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 any rate, poetical in quality. Macaulay's ill-informed
and unjust denunciations live because his genuine emotion
made them into poetry, while his *Lays of Ancient Rome* are dead
because they are not the expression of a genuine emotion.
As the literary taste develops, this quality of emotion,
restrained or loosed, will be more and more widely perceived
at large in literature. It is the quality that must be looked for.
It is the quality that unifies literature (and all the arts).


It is not merely useless, it is harmful, for you to map out literature
into divisions and branches, with different laws, rules, or canons.
The first thing is to obtain some possession of literature.