Standing on earth, not rapt above the pole, More safe I sing with mortal voice, _unchanged_ To hoarse or mute, _though fallen on evil days, On evil days though fallen, and evil tongues, In darkness, and with dangers compassed round_; or: Let such bethink them, if the sleepy drench Of that forgetful lake benumb not still, _That in our proper motion we ascend Up to our native seat; descent and fall To us are adverse_: --these speak of the majesty of the soul; but the other only of the bitterness of the personality. But you will say, Tennyson was putting words into the mouth of a very human, limited personality; and so the piece is more artistic as it is, and would be inappropriate otherwise. These are the words she actually would have said. True. The personality does speak in prose. Prose is the language of personality; and no doubt it was first invented when first the souls rayed out personalities from themselves; no doubt poetry is the older, as it is the more august. So the style used in _The Princess_ is suitable, well-chosen, artistic; it fits the subject admirably; which proves that the subject is essentially a prose one. For prose--history, philosophy, criticism--examines and criticises life from without; but poetry illumines it from within. Prose considers and passes judgment on the external, the seeming, the current: Poetry dwells within the holy of holies and her whole burden is the story of the Soul. If she looks outward at all--and she does that too, at times--it is from her own standpoint, and in the eternal manner. She does not then criticise; her tones do not mince nor falter. The bardic schools had a law, that the office of the Bard was solely to extol what was noble; there were other orders, not sacred like the bardic, whose business was to satirize or to amuse. One can see that such a law must have come from a time when that one force which, as was said above, alone can move poetry to anger absolute, was not in evidence: for, except that they must fight that force, that old law holds for the bards now. So poetry, looking down into this world, criticises no one and nothing. She exalts whom she will; she mantles humanity with godhood: and whom she will--the antihumanists, the plotters against the freedom and beauty of the soul--she thunders upon.