matter as with Browning, or treat contemporary life nobly as with
Tennyson. In subordination to one essential beauty in all good
literary style, in all literature as a fine art, as there are many
beauties of poetry so the beauties of prose are many, and it is the
business of criticism to estimate them as such; as it is good in the
criticism of verse to look for those hard, logical, and quasi-prosaic
excellences which that too has, or needs. To find in the poem, amid
the flowers, the allusions, the mixed perspectives, of Lycidas for
instance, the thought, the logical structure:--how wholesome! how
delightful! as to identify in prose what we call the poetry, the
imaginative power, not treating it as out of place and a kind of
vagrant intruder, but by way of an estimate of its rights, that is,
of its achieved powers, there.

[7] Dryden, with the characteristic instinct of his age, loved to
emphasise the distinction between poetry and prose, the protest
against their confusion with each other, coming with somewhat
diminished effect from one whose poetry was so prosaic. In truth,
his sense of prosaic excellence affected his verse rather than his
prose, which is not only fervid, richly figured, poetic, as we say,
but vitiated, all unconsciously, by many a scanning line. Setting up
correctness, that humble merit of prose, as the central literary
excellence, he is really a less correct writer than he may seem,
still with an imperfect mastery of the relative pronoun. It might
have been foreseen that, in the rotations of mind, the province of
poetry in prose would find its assertor; and, a century after Dryden,
amid very different intellectual needs, and with the need therefore
of great modifications in literary form, the range of the poetic
force in literature was effectively enlarged by Wordsworth. The true
distinction between prose and poetry he regarded as the almost