knowledge. Let us illustrate this upon Poetry, which the most of us will
allow to be the highest form of literary expression, if not of all
artistic expression. Of all the testimony paid to Poetry, none commands
better witness than this--that, as Johnson said of Gray's Elegy 'it
abounds with images which find a mirror in every mind, and with
sentiments to which every heart returns an echo.' When George Eliot said,
'I never before met with so many of my own feelings expressed just as I
should like them,' she but repeated of Wordsworth (in homelier, more
familiar fashion) what Johnson said of Gray; and the same testimony lies
implicit in Emerson's fine remark that 'Universal history, the poets, the
romancers'--all good writers, in short--'do not anywhere make us feel
that we intrude, that this is for our betters. Rather it is true that, in
their greatest strokes, there we feel most at home.' The mass of
evidence, of which these are samples, may be summarised thus:--As we
dwell here between two mysteries, of a soul within and an ordered
Universe without, so among us are granted to dwell certain men of more
delicate intellectual fibre than their fellows--men whose minds have, as
it were, filaments to intercept, apprehend, conduct, translate home to us
stray messages between these two mysteries, as modern telegraphy has
learnt to search out, snatch, gather home human messages astray over
waste waters of the Ocean.

If, then, the ordinary man be done this service by the poet, that (as Dr
Johnson defines it) 'he feels what he remembers to have felt before, but
he feels it _with a great increase of sensibility_'; or even if, though
the message be unfamiliar, it suggests to us, in Wordsworth's phrase, to
'feel that we are greater than we know,' I submit that we respond to it
less by anything that usually passes for knowledge, than by an
improvement of sensibility, a tuning up of the mind to the poet's pitch;
so that the man we are proud to send forth from our Schools will be