To imitate, then, being instinctive in our nature, so too we have an instinct for harmony and rhythm, metre being manifestly a species of rhythm: and man, being born to these instincts and little by little improving them, out of his early improvisations created Poetry. Combining these two instincts, with him, we arrive at _harmonious imitation._ Well and good. But what is it we imitate in poetry?-- noble things or mean things? After considering this, putting mean things aside as unworthy, and voting for the nobler--which must at the same time be true, since without truth there can be no real nobility--Aristotle has to ask `In what way true? True to ordinary life, with its observed defeats of the right by the wrong? or true, as again instinct tells good men it should be, _universally_?' So he arrives at his conclusion that a true thing is not necessarily truth of fact in a world where truth in fact is so often belied or made meaningless--not the record that Alcibiades went somewhere and suffered something--but truth to the Universal, the superior demand of our conscience. In such a way only we know that "The Tempest" or "Paradise Lost" or "The Ancient Mariner" or "Prometheus Unbound" can be truer than any police report. Yet we know that they are truer in essence, and in significance, since they appeal to eternal verities--since they imitate the Universal--whereas the police report chronicles (faithfully, as in duty bound, even usefully in its way) events which may, nay must, be significant somehow but cannot at best be better to us than phenomena, broken ends and shards. VI I return to the child. Clearly in obeying the instinct which I have tried to illustrate, he is searching to realise himself; and, as educators, we ought to help this effort--or, at least, not to hinder it. Further, if we agree with Aristotle, in this searching to realise himself through imitation, what will the child most nobly and naturally imitate? He will imitate what Aristotle calls 'the Universal,' the superior demand. And does not this bring us back to consent with what I have been preaching from the start in this course--that to realise ourselves in _What Is_ not only in degree transcends mere knowledge and activity, _What Knows_ and _What Does,_ but transcends it in kind? It is not only what the child unconsciously longs for: it is that for which (in St Paul's words) 'the whole creation groaneth and travaileth in pain together until now'; craving for this (I make you the admission) as emotionally, as the heart may be thrilled, the breast surge, the eyes swell with tears, at a note drawn from the violin: feeling that somewhere, beyond reach, we have a lost sister, and she speaks to our soul. VII Who, that has been a child, has not felt this surprise of beauty, the revelation, the call of it? The sounding cataract Haunted me like a passion ...