you can detect the cat walking across the stage in the sublimest
passages of literature. But more advanced souls will grieve for you.


The study of Wordsworth's criticism makes the seventh step
in my course of treatment. The eighth is to return to those poems
of Wordsworth's which you have already perused, and read them again
in the full light of the author's defence and explanation.
Read as much Wordsworth as you find you can assimilate,
but do not attempt either of his long poems. The time, however,
is now come for a long poem. I began by advising narrative poetry
for the neophyte, and I shall persevere with the prescription.
I mean narrative poetry in the restricted sense; for epic poetry
is narrative. *Paradise Lost* is narrative; so is *The Prelude*.
I suggest neither of these great works. My choice falls on
Elizabeth Browning's *Aurora Leigh*. If you once work yourself
"into" this poem, interesting yourself primarily (as with Wordsworth)
in the events of the story, and not allowing yourself to be obsessed
by the fact that what you are reading is "poetry"--if you do this,
you are not likely to leave it unfinished. And before you reach the end
you will have encountered *en route* pretty nearly all the moods of poetry
that exist: tragic, humorous, ironic, elegiac, lyric--everything.
You will have a comprehensive acquaintance with a poet's mind.
I guarantee that you will come safely through if you treat the work
as a novel. For a novel it effectively is, and a better one than any
written by Charlotte Brontë or George Eliot. In reading, it would be well
to mark, or take note of, the passages which give you the most pleasure,
and then to compare these passages with the passages selected for praise
by some authoritative critic. *Aurora Leigh* can be got
in the "Temple Classics" (1s. 6d.), or in the "Canterbury Poets" (1s.).