partakes of the spiritual character of poetry. When a page is
changed from poetry into prose it is flattened, deadened; when from
prose into poetry it is uplifted, enlivened. You get a something else
and a something more. Reduced to plain prose, the famous passage from
the mouth of Viola in "Twelfth Night" would read somewhat thus: "My
father had a daughter who loved a man and would let no one know of her
love, but concealed it, until her cheek grew pale with grief,
patiently bearing within her bosom the misery of an untold
attachment." Now hear the poet:--

"She never told her love,
But let concealment, like a worm i' the bud,
Feed on her damask cheek: she pined in thought:
And with a green and yellow melancholy
She sat like patience on a monument,
Smiling at grief."

What has been done with the prose statement? Instead of a bare fact we
have a picture, a twofold picture; and this, in its compact, fresh,
rose-tinted vividness, carries the whole into our hearts with a
tenfold success. Through emotional joy we apprehend, as by the light
of an instantaneous ignition, the state of the sufferer. The
prose-report is a smoldering fire on the hearth, through whose sleepy
smoke there comes a partial heat; the poetic is the flame in
full fervor, springing upward, illuminating, warming the heart,
delighting the intellect. The imagination of the reader, quickened by
illustrations so apt and original, is by their beauty tuned to its
most melodious key, while by the rare play of intellectual vitality
his mind is dilated. He has become mentally a richer man, enriched
through the refining and enlarging of his higher sensibilities, and