the poet, but only that which has beauty. Therefore he has no need
laboriously to work out a scientific method for sifting facts. If his
love of the beautiful is satisfied by a thing, that thing is real.
"Beauty is truth, truth beauty"; Keats' words have been echoed and
reechoed by poets. [Footnote: A few examples of poems dealing with this
subject are Shelley, _A Hymn to Intellectual Beauty_; Mrs. Browning,
_Pan Is Dead_; Henry Timrod, _A Vision of Poesy_; Madison Cawein,
_Prototypes_.] If Poe's rejection of

The loftiest star of unascended heaven,
Pinnacled dim in the intense inane,

in favor of attainable "treasures of the jewelled skies" be an offense
against truth, it is not, poets would say, because of his
non-conformance to the so-called facts of astronomy, but because his
sense of beauty is at fault, leading him to prefer prettiness to
sublimity. As for the poet's visions, of naiad and dryad, which the
philosopher avers are less true than chemical and physical forces, they
represent the hidden truth of beauty, which is threaded through the ugly
medley of life, being invisible till under the light of the poet's
thought it flashes out like a pattern in golden thread, woven through a
somber tapestry.

It is only when the poet is not keenly alive to beauty that he begins to
fret about making an artificial connection between truth and beauty, or,
as he is apt to rename them, between wisdom and fancy. In the eighteenth
century when the poet's vision of truth became one with the scientist's,
he could not conceive of beauty otherwise than as gaudy ornaments,
"fancies," with which he might trim up his thoughts. The befuddled
conception lasted over into the romantic period; Beattie [Footnote: See