Therefore the poet has usually claimed for himself the title, not of imitator, but of seer. To his purblind readers, who see men as trees walking, he is able, with the search-light of his genius, to reveal the essential forms of things. Mrs. Browning calls him "the speaker of essential truth, opposed to relative, comparative and temporal truth"; [Footnote: _Aurora Leigh_.] James Russell Lowell calls him "the discoverer and revealer of the perennial under the deciduous"; [Footnote: _The Function of the Poet_.] Emerson calls him "the only teller of news." [Footnote: _Poetry and Imagination_. The following are some of the poems asserting that the poet is the speaker of ideal truth: Blake, _Hear the Voice of the Ancient Bard;_ Montgomery, _A Theme for a Poet;_ Bowles, _The Visionary Boy;_ Wordsworth, _Personal Talk;_ Coleridge, _To Wm. Wordsworth;_ Arnold, _The Austerity of Poetry;_ Rossetti, _Sonnet, Shelley;_ Bulwer Lytton, _The Dispute of the Poets;_ Mrs. Browning, _Pan is Dead;_ Landor, _To Wordsworth_; Jean Ingelow, _The Star's Monument_; Tupper, _Wordsworth_; Tennyson, _The Poet_; Swinburne, _The Death of Browning_ (Sonnet V), _A New Year's Ode_; Edmund Gosse, _Epilogue_; James Russell Lowell, Sonnets XIV and XV on _Wordsworth's Views of Capital Punishment_; Bayard Taylor, _For the Bryant Festival_; Emerson, _Saadi_; M. Clemmer, _To Emerson_; Warren Holden, _Poetry_; P. H. Hayne, _To Emerson_; Edward Dowden, _Emerson_; Lucy Larcom, _R. W. Emerson_; R. C. Robbins, _Emerson_; Henry Timrod, _A Vision of Poesy_; G. E. Woodberry, _Ode at the Emerson Centenary_; Bliss Carman, _In a Copy of Browning_; John Drinkwater, _The Loom of the Poets_; Richard Middleton, _To an Idle Poet_; Shaemas O'Sheel, _The Poet Sees that Truth and Passion are One_.] Here we are, then, at the real point of dispute between the philosopher and the poet. They claim the same vantage-point from which to overlook human life. One would think they might peacefully share the same pinnacle, but as a matter of fact they are continuously jostling one another. In vain one tries to quiet their contentiousness. Turning to the most deeply Platonic poets of our period--Coleridge, Wordsworth, Shelley, Arnold, Emerson,--one may inquire, Does not your description of the poet precisely tally with Plato's description of the philosopher? Yes, they aver, but Plato falsified when he named his seer a philosopher rather than a poet. [Footnote: In rare cases, the poet identifies himself with the philosopher. See Coleridge, _The Garden of Boccaccio_; Kirke White, _Lines Written on Reading Some of His Own Earlier Sonnets_; Bulwer Lytton, _Milton_; George E. Woodberry, _Agathon_.] Surely if the quarrel may be thus reduced to a matter of terminology, it grows trivial, but let us see how the case stands. From one approach the dispute seems to arise from a comparison of methods. Coleridge praises the truth of Wordsworth's poetry as being