(_c_) In the _third_ place, and finally, if we consider the specific character of poetry relatively to this distinction between music and painting, and we may include with it the other plastic arts, we shall find the same simply to consist in the subordination of the mode under which all poetical content is envisaged and configured by the medium of sense. In other words, when tone, as it does in the art of music, or for that matter, colour as in that of painting, no longer essentially recovers and expresses the entire content, in that case the musical treatment of the composition under its aspects of time, no less than those of harmony and melody, drops away; we have left us merely the generalized configuration of the time-measure of syllables and words, to which we may add rhythm, euphony, and the like. And further, it is to be noted that we have this, not in the sense of a genuine medium for the content, but rather as a mode of externality which is accidental, and which only receives an artistic form, because art cannot permit any mode of its external manifestation whatever to be entirely a question of accidental caprice. (_α_) In connection with this withdrawal of the spiritual content from the sensuous medium we are at once met with the question what it is then which, under such a view, constitutes the actual externality or objectivity in poetry, that of tone being thus excluded. The answer to this is simple. It is the _ideal envisagement_ and _imaginative content_ itself. We have here spiritual forms substituted for sensuous, and supply a configurative material, such as we met with before in marble, bronze, colour, or musical tones. In other words, we must guard ourselves from such an inadequate statement of the facts as that ideas and imagery are nothing more or less than the _content_ of poetry. This is unquestionably true in a sense, as we shall demonstrate more closely later on. Despite this, however, we are equally justified in asserting that idea, imagery, emotion, and the like are specific modes, under which every content in poetry is subsumed and manifested; and consequently, that is, owing to the fact that the sensuous aspect of the communication remains throughout a purely accidental one[5]--it is these forms which supply the real material which the poet has to elaborate artistically. No doubt the fact, the content, must in poetry, as in other arts, receive its due objectification for spirit; objectivity in this sense, however, is the exchange of what was previously an external reality for one that is ideal; one which receives an existence exclusively in conscious life itself, as something conceived or imagined exclusively by mind. Mind is here on its own ground objective to itself, and it suffers the medium of speech merely as a means, that is to say, partly as one of communication, and partly as one of immediate externality, from which, as from the pure symbol merely, it is withdrawn throughout from itself into itself. For