(_c_) Despite therefore the completeness with which the art of poetry reproduces, under a mode of objectification that is most ideal, the entire totality of Beauty, nevertheless intelligence is able to discover even here too in this final domain of art a residue of defect. We may for this purpose within our art-system directly contrast the poetic art with that of architecture. In other words architecture was still unable to subordinate the external material to the ideal content sufficiently to clothe the same in a form adequate to mind; poetry on the other hand carries the process of negating its sensuous medium so far that instead of transforming that which stands in opposition to gross spatial matter, namely tone, as architecture does with its material into a significant symbol, it rather reduces it to a mere sign of no significance. But by doing so it destroys the fusion of spiritual ideality with external existence, so thoroughly that to this extent it ceases to be compatible with the original notion of Art. In other words it comes dangerously near to bidding goodbye to the region of sense altogether, remaining wholly absorbed in that of ideality. The fair mean between these extremes of architecture and poetry is secured by sculpture, painting, and music. Every one of these arts not merely still reproduces the spiritual content completely in a medium borrowed from the objective world, but also leaves us with that which lies open to our senses, no less than our intelligence. For although painting and music, regarded as romantic arts, attach themselves to a medium already more ideal, they do none the less supply the immediacy of objective existence, which, however, in this increase of ideality, shows indications of disappearance, while again from the opposite point of view they prove themselves, through their media of colour and tone, more profuse in fulness of particularization and manifold configuration than is required from the material of sculpture. No doubt the art of poetry in its turn also endeavours, as a set-off to this defect, to place the objective world before us with a breadth and variety which even painting, at least in a single composition, fails to secure: none the less this comprehensiveness remains throughout merely a realization confined to consciousness itself; and, if it so happens that poetry, in response to a demand for more material artistic realization, attempts to increase the impression on our senses, it is only able to do this by either borrowing these effects from music and painting, in order to secure artistic means otherwise foreign to it; or it is forced, if it seeks retain its genuine character, to employ these sister arts only under a subordinate relation of service, while the main stress is laid on the ideas of conscious life, the imagination which appeals to the imagination, with which it is above all concerned.