It is not the greatest masters who surround their expression with a haze, even with a glory haze. It is not the greatest masters who express things vaguely because they see them dimly. They see the thing and speak it. But the supreme poet not only sees thus with his intellect; he experiences with his feelings. He possesses "the experiencing nature." Emerson declares that "among partial men he stands for the complete man, the representative of man, in virtue of having the largest power to receive and impart." This is, of course, said of the best; it is not to be said of the scribblers and the poetasters in their thousands; it is not to be said of the innumerable warblers whose feeble songs "grate on their scrannel pipes of wretched straw"; it is not true even of a canorous rhetorician, such as Swinburne, or a dreamy teller of tales like William Morris; but it is beyond question true of a Shakespeare or a Goethe. These were men of three-storied brain and also of thrice capacious soul. Says Coleridge: "No man was ever yet a great poet without being a profound philosopher." For poetry is the blossom and the fragrance of all human knowledge, human thoughts, human passions, emotions, language; and Carlyle tells us of Goethe, "His resources have been accumulated from nearly all the provinces of human intellect and activity," while his culture was learned "not from art and literature alone, but also by action and passion in the rugged school of experience." It is, therefore, not for nothing that Lowell declares-- I believe the poets; it is they Who utter wisdom from the central deep. Nor is it for nothing that Wordsworth declares poetry to be "the breath and finer spirit of all knowledge." The student of poetry may doubtless be studying aesthetics, but he is not merely dallying with aesthetics. If he is communing thoughtfully with mighty spirits like these--the penetrators to the central deep--is he not gaining, by the most royal road known to humanity, the most liberal education for the fullest life? * * * * *