These beauteous forms, Through a long absence, have not been to me As is a landscape to a blind man’s eye: But oft in lonely rooms, and ’mid the din Of towns and cities, I have owed to them, In hours of weariness, sensations sweet, Felt in the blood, and felt along the heart; And passing even unto my purer mind, With tranquil restoration.... ... that serene and blessed mood, In which the affections gently lead us on,-- Until, the breath of this corporeal frame And even the motion of our human blood Almost suspended, we are laid asleep In body, and become a living soul; While with an eye made quiet by the power Of harmony, and the deep power of joy, We see into the life of things.... And I have felt A presence that disturbs me with the joy Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime Of something far more deeply interfused, Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns, And the round ocean, and the living air, And the blue sky, and in the mind of man: A motion and a spirit, that impels All thinking things, all objects of all thought, And rolls through all things. The sweet melody of Tennyson’s lullaby has here given away to a deep, organ-like harmony, that swells and reverberates, while the words seem to be making the simplest and most direct of statements. Image and plain statement so mingle that we cannot distinguish them, Truth suddenly seems radiant with a rare and angelic Beauty, and the very atmosphere breathes the loftiness of Noble Purity. Unexpectedly almost we find ourselves in the presence of Divinity itself, and the humblest meets the loftiest on common ground. CHAPTER II. _WHAT CONSTITUTES A GOOD ESSAY?_ Prose has a bad name. We think of it and speak of it as including everything in language that is _not_ poetry. In former times art in literature meant poetry,--or, at a stretch, it included in addition only oratory. The beginning of art in the use of _unmeasured_ language (if we may use that term to designate language that does not have the metrical form) was undoubtedly oratory,--the impassioned appeal of a speaker to his fellow men. The language was rhythmical, but not measured, that is, not susceptible of division into lines, corresponding to bars of music; and the element of beauty was distinctly subordinate to the elements of nobility and truth. In modern times poetry has come to be more and more the mere aggregation of images of beauty, without much reference to the intellectual, and still less to the ethical; and prose has been the recognized medium for the intellectual and the moral.