But poetry cannot be spread upon things like butter; it must play upon them like light, and be the medium through which we see them. Lucretius does himself an injustice. If his philosophy had been wormwood to him, he could not have said, as he does just before this passage: “Like a sharp blow of the thyrsus, a great hope of praise vibrates through my heart and fills my breast with tender love of the Muses, whereby now, instinct with flowering fancy, I traverse pathless haunts of the Pierides, by no man’s foot trodden before. It is joy to reach undefiled fountains and quaff; it is joy to gather fresh flowers and weave a matchless crown for my head of those bays with which never yet the Muses veiled the brow of any man; first, in that I teach sublime truths and come to free the soul from the strangling knots of superstition; then, in that on so dark a theme I pour forth so clear a song, suffusing all with poetic beauty,... if haply by such means I might keep thy mind intent upon my verses, until thine eye fathoms the whole structure of nature, and the fixed form that makes it beautiful.”[2] Here, I think, we have the solution to our doubt. The reasonings and investigations of philosophy are arduous, and if poetry is to be linked with them, it can be artificially only, and with a bad grace. But the vision of philosophy is sublime. The order it reveals in the world is something beautiful, tragic, sympathetic to the mind, and just what every poet, on a small or on a large scale, is always trying to catch. In philosophy itself investigation and reasoning are only preparatory and servile parts, means to an end. They terminate in insight, or what in the noblest sense of the word may be called _theory, θεωρία_,--a steady contemplation of all things in their order and worth. Such contemplation is imaginative. No one can reach it who has not enlarged his mind and tamed his heart. A philosopher who attains it is, for the moment, a poet; and a poet who turns his practised and passionate imagination on the order of all things, or on anything in the light of the whole, is for that moment a philosopher.