cast off the fetters of meaning that it might do freer service to
the jealous god of visible beauty. The overpowering rivalry of
speech would rob it of all its symbolic intent and leave its bare
picture. Literature has favoured rather the way of the ear and has
given itself zealously to the tuneful ordering of sounds. Let it
be repeated, therefore, that for the traffic of letters the senses
are but the door-keepers of the mind; none of them commands an only
way of access,--the deaf can read by sight, the blind by touch. It
is not amid the bustle of the live senses, but in an under-world of
dead impressions that Poetry works her will, raising that in power
which was sown in weakness, quickening a spiritual body from the
ashes of the natural body. The mind of man is peopled, like some
silent city, with a sleeping company of reminiscences,
associations, impressions, attitudes, emotions, to be awakened into
fierce activity at the touch of words. By one way or another, with
a fanfaronnade of the marching trumpets, or stealthily, by
noiseless passages and dark posterns, the troop of suggesters
enters the citadel, to do its work within. The procession of
beautiful sounds that is a poem passes in through the main gate,
and forthwith the by-ways resound to the hurry of ghostly feet,
until the small company of adventurers is well-nigh lost and
overwhelmed in that throng of insurgent spirits.

To attempt to reduce the art of literature to its component sense-
elements is therefore vain. Memory, "the warder of the brain," is
a fickle trustee, whimsically lavish to strangers, giving up to the
appeal of a spoken word or unspoken symbol, an odour or a touch,
all that has been garnered by the sensitive capacities of man. It
is the part of the writer to play upon memory, confusing what
belongs to one sense with what belongs to another, extorting images