By virtue of this expression of ideas and emotions, the abstract ideality of music receives a clearer and more secure exposition. At the same time what we have here unfolded by its means is, to a certain extent, not the point of view of idea and the artistic mode adapted to its expression, but merely the emotional life as it accompanies the same; also in part we find that here, too, music entirely divests itself of fusion with the verbal text in order to develop its own movement without restraint in the world of tone simply. For this reason the realm of idea, which is unable to remain under I such a more purely abstract mode of ideal intensity, and seeks a configuration in a world which embraces its one homogeneous and concrete reality, breaks away on its part likewise from the bond of music, and in the exclusive art of poetry discovers the adequate realization it demands. _Poetry,_ in other words the art of human speech, is the _third_ or final step, the _totality_, which unites and embraces in a yet higher sphere, in the sphere of the very life of Spirit itself[2], the two extremes of the plastic arts and music. For on the one hand poetry contains just as music does the principle which apprehends an ideal content in its ideality, the principle which in architecture, sculpture, and painting is lost, or at most incompletely asserted. And on the other hand it expatiates itself, under the modes of ideal conception, intuition, and feeling simply, in an objective world, which does not entirely destroy the defined forms of sculpture and painting, and is capable of unfolding all the conditions of an event, a succession or interchange of emotional states, passions, conceptions, and the exclusive course of human action with more completeness than any other art. 2. But in a still more intimate way the art of poetry constitutes a third or final term in its relation to painting and music regarded as the _romantic_ arts. (_a_) One reason of this is that its principle is that generally of an _intelligence_ which has nothing further to do with gross matter as such, seeking, as is the case with architecture, to transform it through symbolism to an environment related analogically to spiritual life, or as in the case of sculpture in order to implant upon material substance the natural form congenial to such life under the spatial condition of its expression. What the end is now is to express immediately for mind the manifestations of Spirit with all its ideas of imagination and art, without setting forth their external and visible bodily presence. And a further reason consists in this, that poetry is able to grasp in the form of ideality itself and with a far greater wealth than is possible for music or painting, not merely the innermost actuality of conscious life, but also what is particular and individual in external existence, and equally able to contrast such facts in the complete diversity of their specific traits and accidental peculiarities.