In illustration of this, let me give an anecdote which I lately read in one of Canon Liddon’s sermons in St. Paul’s:—“Why do you sit up so late at night?” was a question put to an eminent mathematician. “To enjoy myself,” was the reply. “But how can that be? I thought you spent your time in working out problems.” “So I do, and that is my enjoyment,” answered the mathematician. “Depend upon it,” he added, “those lose a form of enjoyment too keen and sweet to be described, who do not know, after long effort, what is the joy of recognizing the agreement between two mathematical formulæ.” If, in such moments of profound satisfaction, our mathematician had added to his other powers the power adequately to utter the joy of his “eureka,” the expression of it would, no doubt, have been a high poem. “Poetry is the blossom and fragrancy of all human knowledge, human thoughts, human passions, emotions, language,”[4] or it is the fine wine that is served at the banquet of human life. And what is true of mathematical is still more true of other forms of truth. Whenever a soul comes into vivid contact with it, there springs up that emotion which is the essence of Poetry. And that this contact is so delightful, that all truth and the human soul are so akin, that when they recognize each other, the immediate result is this thrill of joy, this pure and high emotion, what does not this fact hint of the nature of the soul and its origin? We now then say that as Physical Science explains the appearances of the material world solely by the properties of matter, and it is its business to do so, so Poetry seizes the relation of outward objects to the soul and expresses this, and it is its business to do so. Physical Science deals with the outward object alone. Poetry has to do with the object _plus_ the soul of man. Or, to put it otherwise: from the meeting and combined action of these two forces, the outward object and the soul, there arises a creation, or emanation, different from either, but partaking of the nature of both. And it is the business of true poetry to express this. Any real object, vividly apprehended, we thus see, will awaken in an intelligent and emotional being a response which is the beginning of poetry. The depth and breadth and volume of that response will, of course, be proportioned to the nobility of the object which evokes it, and to the responsive capacity of the mind to which it makes its appeal. And if it be asked, How are we to estimate the nobility of any object? we may say that its measure will be the variety and strength and elevation of the emotions which it has the power of evoking in those spirits which are most finely touched. The deeper, the larger, the higher the object presented to a soul fitted to receive it, the greater will be the body of emotion with which that soul will respond to it, the finer will be the poetry which is the expression of that emotion.