A stricter analysis, however, demands of poetry not only a distinctive mode of conceiving its subject, but a distinctive mode of utterance. If poetry is the fine art of words, and {xvi} its aim to give all the sensuous, emotional, and intellectual delight of which words are capable, it is clear that Sidney and Bacon gave full weight to only one side of the truth, and that they included far too much. The poetic novel, to which their definition applied so aptly, is a case in point, since it was a hybrid and transitional form, a thing that was just ceasing to be poetry, but had not yet become the new form of art to which it was the harbinger. The _Arcadia_, and the same may be said of the Elizabethan novel generally, shows its near relationship to poetry in both ways, in its style and in the purely imaginative nature of the story, the characters, and the life depicted. In the introduction to Defoe’s _Roxana_ and _Moll Flanders_, published in this series, I compared the opening of Defoe’s stories, _Robinson Crusoe_, for instance, so definite as to time and place, so particular in the mention of names and the exact circumstances in which the events occur, with the beginning of the _Arcadia_, which carries us at once away in imagination to a flowery meadow in a land of Arcady that has no existence save in the fancy of the poets and those under their spell. There is no effort to make the story credible, or the characters real, by attaching them with the bands of verisimilitude to the world of familiar things. Musidorus and Pyrocles, Pamela and Philoclea, Zelmane and Amphialus, are in no way studies from life, but embodiments of Sidney’s chivalrous energy and thirst for action, and of the craving for a life of pastoral simplicity and ideal love, strengthened by his enforced existence amidst the pomps and unrealities of a court. While he was living in retirement at Wilton, where the _Arcadia_ was begun, he gave vent to this feeling in the following lines:-- “Well was I while under shade Oaten reeds me music made, Striving with my mates in song; Mixing mirth our songs among. Greater was the shepherd’s treasure Than this false, fine, courtly pleasure.”