technical or accidental one of the absence or presence of metrical
beauty, or, say! metrical restraint; and for him the opposition came
to be between verse and prose of course; but, as the essential
dichotomy in this matter, between imaginative and unimaginative
writing, parallel to De Quincey's distinction between "the literature
of power and the literature of knowledge," in the former of which the
composer gives us [8] not fact, but his peculiar sense of fact,
whether past or present.

Dismissing then, under sanction of Wordsworth, that harsher
opposition of poetry to prose, as savouring in fact of the arbitrary
psychology of the last century, and with it the prejudice that there
can be but one only beauty of prose style, I propose here to point
out certain qualities of all literature as a fine art, which, if they
apply to the literature of fact, apply still more to the literature
of the imaginative sense of fact, while they apply indifferently to
verse and prose, so far as either is really imaginative--certain
conditions of true art in both alike, which conditions may also
contain in them the secret of the proper discrimination and
guardianship of the peculiar excellences of either.

The line between fact and something quite different from external
fact is, indeed, hard to draw. In Pascal, for instance, in the
persuasive writers generally, how difficult to define the point
where, from time to time, argument which, if it is to be worth
anything at all, must consist of facts or groups of facts, becomes a
pleading--a theorem no longer, but essentially an appeal to the
reader to catch the writer's spirit, to think with him, if one can or
will--an expression no longer of fact but of his sense of it, his
peculiar intuition of a world, prospective, or discerned below the