If, then, Beauty be a real quality interwoven into the essential texture of Creation, and if Poetry be the fittest human expression of the existence of this quality, it follows that Poetry has to do with truth as really as Science has, though with a different order of truth. This is perhaps not the common view of the matter. An old Scotch gentleman I once knew, one of the most sagacious and wise of his generation, who, whenever anything was propounded which was more than usually extravagant and absurd, used to dismiss it with a wave of his hand, saying: “Oh, that is Poetry.” Yet he was one who could see in the outlines of his native hills, and feel in all human relations, whatever was most beautiful. There are, I dare say, a good many sensible people who share my friend’s view, to whom Poetry is only another name for what is fanciful, fantastic, unreal—only, as one called it, a convenient way of talking nonsense. To these I would say, If this be so, if Poetry be not true, if it have not a real foundation in the nature of things, if genuine Poetry be not as true a form of thinking as any other, indeed one of the highest forms of human thought, then I should not recommend any one to waste time on it, but to have done with it, and turn to more solid pursuits. It is because I have a quite opposite conviction, because I believe Poetry to have a true and noble place in this order of things, a place not made by the conceit of man, but intended by the Maker of this order, because I hold Poetry to be, what Wordsworth has called it, “the breath and finer spirit of all knowledge”—to be “immortal as the heart of man,” it is because of these convictions that there is claimed for it the serious regard of reasonable men, and that it seems worth our while to dwell for a little on one, though only one, aspect of this many-sided study.