No one, as far as I know, has seen this aspect of Poetry more truly, or expressed it so felicitously, as my friend Mr. Matthew Arnold. If he has not been the first to notice it, he has certainly dwelt on it with more emphasis than any previous writer, as far as I know. For his views on this subject I would refer to his delightful Essay on Maurice de Guérin, in his volume entitled “Essays on Criticism.” As it is well to give a good thought in its best possible form, Mr. Arnold will, I know, forgive me if I quote at length his own words. He says:— “The grand power of Poetry is its interpretative power, by which I mean, not the power of drawing out in black and white an explanation of the mystery of the Universe, but the power of so dealing with things as to awaken in us a wonderfully full, new, and intimate sense of them, and of our relations with them. When this sense is awakened in us as to objects without us, we feel ourselves to be in contact with the essential nature of those objects, to be no longer bewildered and oppressed by them, but to have their secret, and to be in harmony with them; and this feeling calms and satisfies us as no other can.... Poetry indeed interprets in another way besides this; but one of its two ways of interpreting is by awakening this sense in us. The interpretations of Science do not give us this intimate sense of objects as the interpretations of Poetry give it; they appeal to a limited faculty, and not to the whole man.” Again Mr. Arnold says:— “Poetry interprets in two ways: it interprets, by expressing with magical felicity the physiognomy and movement of the outward world, and it interprets by expressing, with inspired conviction, the ideas and laws of the inward world of man’s moral and spiritual nature. In other words, Poetry is interpretative by having natural magic in it, and by having moral profundity. In both ways it illuminates man; it gives him a satisfying sense of reality; it reconciles him with himself and the Universe. The greatest poets unite in themselves the faculty of both kinds of interpretation, the naturalistic and the moral. But it is observable that in the poets who unite both kinds, the latter (the moral) usually ends by making itself the master. In Shakespeare the two kinds seem wonderfully to balance each other; but even in him the balance leans; his expression tends to become too little sensuous and simple, too much intellectualized. The same thing may be yet more strongly affirmed of Lucretius and of Wordsworth.”