for the ‘ravishing beauty’ of the visual images excited. This common mistake of exaggerating personal accidents in the means by which a poem attains its end into the chief value of the poem is due to excessive trust in the commonplaces[47] of psychology. [Illustration: Arcadia, Night, a Cloud, Pan, and the Moon] In the analysis of the experience of reading a poem, a diagram, or hieroglyph, is convenient, provided that its limitations are clearly recognised. The spatial relations of the parts of the diagram, for instance, are not intended to stand for spatial relations between parts of what is represented; it is not a picture of the nervous system. Nor are temporal relations intended. Spatial metaphors, whether drawn as diagrams or merely imagined, are dangers only to the unwary. The essential service which pictures can give in abstract matters, namely, the simultaneous and compact representation of states of affairs which otherwise tend to remain indistinct and confused, is worth the slight risk of misunderstanding which they entail. We may begin then with a diagrammatic representation of the events which take place when we read a poem. Other literary experiences will only differ from this in their greater simplicity. The eye is depicted as reading a succession of printed words. As a result there follows a stream of reaction in which six distinct kinds of events may be distinguished. I The visual sensations of the printed words. II Images very closely associated with these sensations. III Images relatively free. IV References to, or ‘thinkings of,’ various things. V Emotions. VI Affective-volitional attitudes. Each of these kinds of occurrences requires some brief description and explanation.