On the other hand, should the story-teller be a poet—one who, like the writer of ‘John Ball,’ has been accustomed to write under the conditions of a form of literary art where the diction is always and necessarily concrete, figurative, and quintessential, and where the movement is metrical—his danger lies in a very different direction. The critic’s interest then lies in watching how the poet will comport himself in another field of imaginative literature—a field where no such conditions as these exist—a field where quintessential and concrete diction, though meritorious, may yet be carried too far, and where those regular and expected bars of the metricist which are the first requisites of verse are not only without function, but are in the way—are fatal, indeed, to that kind of convincement which, and which alone, is the proper quest of prose art. No doubt it is true, as we have before said, that literature being nothing but the reflex of the life of man, or else of the life of nature, the final quest of every form of literature is that special kind of convincement which is inherently suitable to the special form. For the analogy between nature and true art is not a fanciful one, and the relation of function to organism is the same in both. But what is the difference between the convincement achieved by poetic and the convincement achieved by prose art? Is it that the convincement of him who works in poetic forms is, though not necessarily, yet most perfectly achieved by a faithful record of the emotion aroused in his own soul by the impact upon his senses of the external world, while the convincement of the proseman is, though not necessarily, yet most perfectly achieved by a faithful record and picture of the external world itself?