Matthew Arnold will have it that the function of Poetry is the Criticism of Life; and the work of a poet will be important, according to him, only in so far as it throws light on human life and character. But in the work of all poets there is a kind of cream that may be skimmed off (_provided that there is a cream_, and that it was not all sky-blue wretchedness from the first); and when it has been so skimmed, one may say that the poetry is the cream, and the criticism of life the skim-milk. "Such and such a lyric, by so and so," says your poet or poetry-lover, "is of equal value with Hamlet or the Odyssey, all three being absolute in their beauty." "Gammon!" says your man of the world in letters; "there is the criticism of life to be thought of. How shall ten lines be equal to ten thousand?" Which is right? The second will get all the votes; which is no great argument, perhaps. The epic took longer in the writing; but one never knows what may lie behind the lyric. The didactic or philosophic poem, the work full of this criticism, will influence the thought of the world; and if thinking is to be the judge, it will win unquestionably. But the lyric will be singing itself through thousands of minds, in the sunshine, in the mines, over the washtub, heaven knows where: without noise, it will shed its brightness through a million eyes, its sweetness on a million tempers, its clearness and magic on a million imaginations. To the writer of the most perfect lyric, I am not sure that we do not owe as much gratitude as to the writer of the greatest epic or drama: I am almost positive that we owe him more than to the best writer of criticism of life; though it be a dozen lines against a dozen volumes. Most of the English-writing poets have been also, and many of them mainly, philosophers; writing their thought in verse form, and perhaps sprinkling it from the spice-box of pure poetry, and perhaps not. Often and often we find stories or philosophic disquisitions in verse, that might have been told as well in prose; although it has been said rather wisely that nothing should have verse form that could be told honorably without metre. There is a class of idea that journeys leisurely and step by step through the mind; this should be reserved for prose. There are other classes that have the sweep and charge of cavalry, and you build epics and all heroic poetry of them; others that soar singing like the skylark, or that wander from bloom to bloom droning out a magical and honey-laden monody, secrets of a learning incomprehensible to the minds of men. These will be the right stuff for your pure lyrics, these bees and birds in the golden regions west of thought. Their revelations are more esoteric than philosophy; they home to deeper places.