What applies to history applies to the other "dry" branches. Even
Johnson's Dictionary is packed with emotion. Read the last paragraph
of the preface to it: "In this work, when it shall be found that
much is omitted, let it not be forgotten that much likewise is
performed.... It may repress the triumph of malignant criticism to
observe that if our language is not here fully displayed, I have
only failed in an attempt which no human powers have hitherto
completed...." And so on to the close: "I have protracted my work
till most of those whom I wish to please have sunk into the grave, and
success and miscarriage are empty sounds: I therefore dismiss it with
frigid tranquillity, having little to fear or hope from censure or
from praise." Yes, tranquillity; but not frigid! The whole passage,
one of the finest in English prose, is marked by the heat of emotion.
You may discover the same quality in such books as Spencer's _First
Principles_. You may discover it everywhere in literature, from the
cold fire of Pope's irony to the blasting temperatures of Swinburne.
Literature does not begin till emotion has begun.

There is even no essential, definable difference between those two
great branches, prose and poetry. For prose may have rhythm. All
that can be said is that verse will scan, while prose will not. The
difference is purely formal. Very few poets have succeeded in being so
poetical as Isaiah, Sir Thomas Browne, and Ruskin have been in
prose. It can only be stated that, as a rule, writers have shown an
instinctive tendency to choose verse for the expression of the very
highest emotion. The supreme literature is in verse, but the finest
achievements in prose approach so nearly to the finest achievements in
verse that it is ill work deciding between them. In the sense in which
poetry is best understood, all literature is poetry--or is, at