“I am not much disposed,” said the minstrel, “to acknowledge any one form of poetry to be practically higher than another; that is, so far as to elevate the poet who cultivates what you call the highest with some success above the rank of the poet who cultivates what you call a very inferior school with a success much more triumphant. In theory, dramatic poetry may be higher than lyric, and ‘Venice Preserved’ is a very successful drama; but I think Burns a greater poet than Otway.” “Possibly he may be; but I know of no lyrical poet, at least among the moderns, who treats less of Nature as the mere outward form of things, or more passionately animates her framework with his own human heart, than does Robert Burns. Do you suppose when a Greek, in some perplexity of reason or conscience, addressed a question to the oracular oak-leaves of Dodona that the oak-leaves answered him? Don’t you rather believe that the question suggested by his mind was answered by the mind of his fellow-man, the priest, who made the oak-leaves the mere vehicle of communication, as you and I might make such vehicle in a sheet of writing-paper? Is not the history of superstition a chronicle of the follies of man in attempting to get answers from external Nature?” “But,” said the minstrel, “have I not somewhere heard or read that the experiments of Science are the answers made by Nature to the questions put to her by man?” “They are the answers which his own mind suggests to her,--nothing more. His mind studies the laws of matter, and in that study makes experiments on matter; out of those experiments his mind, according to its previous knowledge or natural acuteness, arrives at its own deductions, and hence arise the sciences of mechanics and chemistry, etc. But the matter itself gives no answer: the answer varies according to the mind that puts the question; and the progress of science consists in the perpetual correction of the errors and falsehoods which preceding minds conceived to be the correct answers they received from Nature. It is the supernatural within us,--namely, Mind,--which can alone guess at the mechanism of the natural, namely, Matter. A stone cannot question a stone.” The minstrel made no reply. And there was a long silence, broken but by the hum of the insects, the ripple of onward waves, and the sigh of the wind through reeds. CHAPTER XVII. SAID Kenelm, at last breaking silence-- “‘Rapiamus, amici, Occasionem de die, dumque virent genua, Et decet, obducta solvatur fronte senectus!’” “Is not that quotation from Horace?” asked the minstrel. “Yes; and I made it insidiously, in order to see if you had not acquired what is called a classical education.”