It may further be asked by any one who has not clearly apprehended my meaning (and this would be more than excusable), Do I mean to suggest that literature is not literature unless it contains a double meaning? and, if so, do I not find in allegory the most perfect example of the simultaneous existence of kinetic and potential speech? This would indeed be a _reductio ad absurdum_. I must answer, that allegory (though it may represent the result of an early guess at the nature of art) is not necessarily poetry. There is, indeed, a gross and obvious duality of meaning in such a work as _The Faërie Queene_. The tale written on the paper enables us to reconstruct another. But that other might have been written with no greater difficulty. It does not aid, and may clog with external preoccupations, the tale that we sit down to read. It is an impertinent shadow, a dog that keeps too closely at our heels. Hazlitt rebukes those who think that the allegory of _The Faërie Queene_ will bite them. We are more afraid that it will lick our hands, and all we ask is, that it will allow itself to be forgotten. An acrostic sonnet may be a good sonnet, but we are not likely to perceive its excellence if we are intent upon the initial letters of the lines. No; allegory may be a rude attempt to copy in things said the duality of poetic speech. The old delight in conscious allegory may be comparable to the modern delight in conscious symbolism. But we must not forget for a moment that the resemblance is only one of analogy. When Spenser writes of Mammon’s cave: “Both roof, and floor, and walls were all of gold But overgrown with rust and old decay, And hid in darkness that none could behold The hue thereof; for view of cheerful day Did never in that house itself display, But a faint shadow of uncertain light; Such as a lamp whose life doth fade away; Or as the moon clothéd with cloudy night, Does show to him that walks in fear and sad affright.” When he writes thus, we do not, in our search for potential speech, have to remember that he is writing of the love of money. Away with such tedious recollections. The stanza is like a picture by Rembrandt of an alchemist’s laboratory, where dusty alembic and smouldering fire mean far more than themselves. The lines say something, but we hear much for which they have not words. “The moon clothéd with cloudy night,” is not richer in suggestion than that same description. Not in the allegory but in the words themselves, their order and their melody, must we find, if they are to be literature, that combination of kinetic and potential speech. Let me take another example of fine poetry, and show that it does perform in itself this dual function of language. Let us examine the first stanza of Blake’s “The Tiger”: “Tiger! Tiger! burning bright In the forests of the night, What immortal hand or eye Could frame thy fearful symmetry?”