But, if truth be the essence of the poet's work, "the right describing
note to know a poet by", it would seem that the outward form of it,
the metre and the ornament, are of little moment. "There have been
many most excellent poets that never versified." And verse is nothing
more than a means, and not the only means, of securing a "fitting
raiment" for their matter and suiting their manner "according to the
dignity of their subject". In this suggestion--that harmonious prose
may, for certain forms of poetic thought, be hardly less suitable than
verse--Sidney is at one with Shelley. And neither critic must be taken
to disparage verse, or to mean more than that the matter, the
conception, is the soul of poetry, and that the form is only of moment
so far as it aids--as undoubtedly it does aid--to "reveal the soul
within". It is rather as a witness to the whole scope of their argument
than as a particular doctrine, to be left or taken, that the suggestion
is most profitably regarded.

Having settled the speculative base of poetry, Sidney turns to a yet
more cherished theme, its influence upon character and action. The
"highest end" of all knowledge, he urges, is "the knowledge of a man's
self, with the end of well doing and not of well knowing only". Now
by no artist is this end served so perfectly as by the poet. His only
serious rivals are the moral philosopher and the historian. But neither
of these flies so straight to his mark as the poet. The one gives
precepts that fire no heart to action; the other gives examples without
the precepts that should interpret and control them. The one lives in
the world of ideas, the other in the world of hard and literal fact.
Neither, therefore, has power to bridge the gulf that parts thought
from action; neither can hope to take hold of beings in whose life,
by its very nature, thought and action are indissolubly interwoven.
"Now doth the peerless poet perform both. For whatsoever the philosopher