This specially Balzacian quality is, I think, unique. It is like--it may almost be said to _be_--the poetic imagination, present in magnificent volume and degree, but in some miraculous way deprived and sterilized of the specially poetical quality. By this I do not of course mean that Balzac did not write in verse: we have a few verses of his, and they are pretty bad, but that is neither here nor there. The difference between Balzac and a great poet lies not in the fact that the one fills the whole page with printed words, and the other only a part of it--but in something else. If I could put that something else into distinct words I should therein attain the philosopher's stone, the elixir of life, the _primum mobile_, the _grand arcanum_, not merely of criticism but of all things. It might be possible to coast about it, to hint at it, by adumbrations and in consequences. But it is better and really more helpful to face the difficulty boldly, and to say that Balzac, approaching a great poet nearer perhaps than any other prose writer in any language, is distinguished from one by the absence of the very last touch, the finally constituting quiddity, which makes a great poet different from Balzac. Now, when we make this comparison, it is of the first interest to remember--and it is one of the uses of the comparison, that it suggests the remembrance of the fact--that the great poets have usually been themselves extremely exact observers of detail. It has not made them great poets; but they would not be great poets without it. And when Eugenie Grandet starts from _le petit banc de bois_ at the reference to it in her scoundrelly cousin's letter (to take only one instance out of a thousand), we see in Balzac the same observation, subject to the limitation just mentioned, that we see in Dante and Shakespeare, in Chaucer and Tennyson. But the great poets do not as a rule _accumulate_ detail. Balzac does, and from this very accumulation he manages to derive that singular gigantesque vagueness--differing from the poetic vague, but ranking next to it--which I have here ventured to note as his distinguishing quality. He bewilders us a very little by it, and he gives us the impression that he has slightly bewildered himself. But the compensations of the bewilderment are large.