When a significance, which as such co-ordinates a homogeneous _complexus_ of relations, is apprehended exclusively as significance, yet does not receive the form strictly adequate to this content, but is merely invested with the external ornamentation of art, then we have before us the didactic poem. The didactic poem does not figure among the genuine types of art. For in it we find on the one hand a content already completely elaborated under a mode that is thereby necessarily prosaic, while on the other we have the artistic form, which is merely tacked to it in an external way, for this very reason that it had already been accepted by the mind in a form stamped with _prose_ throughout, and is merely exhibited to our common sense or reflective faculties as instruction under this prosaic aspect, that is to say, with an exclusive reference to the significance embodied in its abstract and general terms. Consequently art, in this its external relation to a content so essentially foreign to its real informing process, can only recognize in the didactic poem its external aspects, such as metre, exalted language, episodic matter, images, similes, ebullitions of sentiment, points of acceleration and transition in the march of ideas, aspects in short which do not give us the heart of the content as such, but rather surround it as an incidental accretion, with the object of alleviating and making more enjoyable the serious and dry tone of the didactic material by means of their more inspiriting atmosphere. That which is intrinsically, in the fundamental conception of it, relegated to prose, cannot receive the poet's mintage, though it may be the peg on which he may hang his mantle[120]. Just as we find, for example, that the art of gardening is in great measure a purely external rearrangement of what is already presented us by Nature, but not necessarily of that which is itself a truly lovely locality; or as the art of building ameliorates by its ornament and external decoration a locality which has been expressly devoted to prosaic purposes and affairs.