XXXVIII.] Many times in her prose George Eliot has recognized the true character of poetry, and she has even given definitions of it which show how well she knew its real nature. She makes Will Ladislaw say that-- To be a poet is to have a soul so quick to discern that no shade of quality escapes it, and so quick to feel that discernment is but a hand playing with finely ordered variety on the chords of emotion--a soul in which knowledge passes instantaneously into feeling, and feeling flashes back as a new organ of knowledge. [Footnote: Middlemarch, chapter XXII.] She thinks poetry and romance are as plentiful in the world as ever they were, that they exist even amidst the conditions created by invention and science; and if we do not find them there it is only because poetry and romance are absent from our own minds. If we have not awe and tenderness, wonder and enthusiasm, poetry cannot come near us, and we shall not be thrilled and exalted by it. [Footnote: Daniel Deronda, chanter XIX.] Yet it is not difficult to see that George Eliot is not a poet in the fullest sense, because hers is not thoroughly and always a poetic mind, because she reasons about things too much. The poet is impressed, moved, thrilled and exalted, and pours out his song from his feelings and transfused with emotion. George Eliot was given to speculation, loved exactness of expression, and kept too close to the real. She had not that lightness of touch, that deftness and flexibility of expression, and that versatility of imaging forth her ideas, which the real poet possesses. Her mind moved with a ponderous tread, which needed a prose style large and stately as its true medium of expression. While she had poetic ideas in abundance, and an imaginative discernment of nature and life, she had not the full gift of poetic speech. She lacked inspiration as well as flexibility of thought, her imagination was not sufficiently rich, and she had not the full sense of rhythmic harmony. George Eliot first began to write in verse, as was to be expected of one gifted with an imagination vigorous as hers. Her love of music, her keen perception of the beauties of nature, her love of form and color, gave added attraction and impetus in the same direction. That she did not continue through many years to write poetry seems to have been partly the result of her intense interest in severer studies. The speculative cast of her mind predominated the poetical so nearly as to turn her away from the poetic side of life to find a solution for its graver and more intricate problems. Her return to the poetic form of expression may be accounted for partly as the result of a greater confidence in her own powers which came from success, and partly from a desire for a new and richer medium of utterance.