such subjection"; he alone "freely ranges within the zodiac of his own
wit".

This, no doubt, is dangerous ground, and it is enforced by still more
dangerous illustrations. But Sidney at once guards himself by insisting,
as Plato had done before him, that the poet too is bound by laws which
he finds but does not make; they are, however, laws not of fact but
of thought, the laws of the idea--that is, of the inmost truth of
things, and of God. Hence it is that the works of the poet seem to
come from God, rather than from man. They stand rather on a level with
nature, the material of all sciences, than with the sciences themselves,
which are nothing more than man's interpretation of nature. In some
sense, indeed, they are above nature; they stand midway between nature
and him who created nature. They are a first nature, "beyond and over
the works of that second nature". For they are the self-revelation of
that which is the noblest work of God, and which in them finds utterance
at its best and brightest.

Thus, so far from being the "mother of lies", poetry is the highest
form of truth. Avowedly so, in what men have always recognized to be
the noblest poetry, the psalms and parables and other writings that
"do imitate the inconceivable excellences of God". To a less degree,
but still avowedly, in that poetry whose theme is philosophy or history.
And so essentially, however men may overlook it, in that poetry which,
professedly dealing with human life as we know it, does not content
itself with reproducing the character of this man or that, but "reined
only with learned discretion, ranges into the divine consideration of
what may be and should be"--of the universal and complete rather than
the individual and imperfect.