canvas of the poet's music and vision; marble and bronze, the Parthenon and Notre Dame, are misleading, unstable, and fleeting expressions of man and nature compared with poetry. The more I think of the true substance of poetry, the more impossible it is for me to see the necessity of Wordsworth's affirmation: and his own poetry, as has long been recognized, gives it the lie effectually. As soon as he perceived the true nature of poetry, Wordsworth began to write it as if no one had ever written it before--an adventure commonly resented by the moralists of art, and in the case of Wordsworth attended by a lifetime of detraction. Why did not the literary world rise up as one man and crown the poet who wrote in 1798, in his twenty-eighth year, the lines on Tintern Abbey? Why was Wordsworth left without an audience, driven back into himself, and thwarted in all his purposes, so that we have only--in "The Prelude" and "The Excursion"--the gateway, porch, and raw material of the city he meant to build? Why, but because he was an immoralist--he, and not Byron--saying in a new manner that which had not been said before: meaning something that schools and churches, theatres and institutions, the periodical press and the literature of the day, did not mean. Wordsworth had to think and imagine the world and the universe for himself: for him the creeds were outworn; for him "the smug routine and things allowed," in which the common mind and imagination and the estates of the realm live in most ages, were a dungeon and miasma. The imagination of Wordsworth could not breathe in any Greek mythology, any Christian Heaven and Hell, or theological system of the Universe. Out of all the mythologies, pagan and Christian, he culled this one thing only--the idea of spirit: which he whittled down finally in the ninth book of "The Excursion" to an "active principle"--no longer a poetical but a metaphysical idea. Now, metaphysic is an aborted poetry. Poetry is concrete, requiring the exercise of all the material powers of body, mind, and soul, which, co-operating, are imagination. I have to use these words "mind" and "soul," because for what I wish to say there is as yet no language. I hold that men can think and imagine things for which there are no words: and that men must attend upon the expression of these things before all others: that these unsaid things are of more moment than all the literature and religion of the past: and that these things can in the first instance be said only by the poet, by one who makes words mean what he, that is, what Matter chooses. The mind, separating itself from the body and the soul, can transmute a figure of speech into a category; indeed, there is probably no figure of speech that could not be petrified into a metaphysic: metaphysics are the fossil remains of dead poetries. Also, the soul can separate itself from the body and the mind, and petrify a figure of speech into a theology: creeds are the fossil remains of dead