possible purpose. To take an analogy: if we say that a democratic
government is the best kind of government, we mean that it most completely
fulfills the highest function of a government--the realisation of the will
of the people. But it is also a function of government to organise the
people and--although, just as we may think that Blake's poem finally
beats Ruskin's prose on Ruskin's own ground, we may think, too, that the
government that best represents the people will finally best organise
the people--it may quite plausibly be said that in this business an
aristocratic or militant government will, in an imperfectly conditioned
civilisation (such as that of the world to-day), excel a democratic
government. Nevertheless, we still say with an easy mind that a democratic
government is the best government, without qualification, since it excels
in the highest purpose of government. Clearly Coleridge implies, and
reasonably enough, an elaboration such as this in his definition--the best
words in the best order. To say that Blake and Ruskin, in those passages,
were giving expression to dissimilar experiences is but to emphasise the
distinction between prose and poetry. The closest analysis discovers no
difference between the essential thought of the one and the other. But
Blake projected the thought through a mood of higher intensity, and, where
Ruskin perfectly ordered admirable words, he perfectly ordered the
best words. It is the controlling mood that differs, not the material
controlled. Hence it is that still another mind, starting from the same
radical perception, might transfigure it through a mood as urgent as
Blake's and produce yet another poem of which it could strictly be said
that here again were the best words in the best order. We should then
have three men moved by the same thought; in the one case the imaginative
shaping of the thought would fail to reach the point at which the record
and communication of ecstasy become the chief intention, and the expression
would be prose; in each of the other cases the shaping would pass beyond
that point, and there would be two separate moods expressed, each in the