nct comprehension; but when I had done, he
shook his head and said: 'This is no experiment, this is an idea.' I
stopped with some degree of irritation; for the point which separated
us was most luminously marked by this expression. The opinions in
_Dignity and Grace_, again occurred to me; the old grudge was just
awakening; but I smothered it, and merely said: "I was happy to find
that I had got ideas without knowing it, nay that I saw them before my
eyes."

'Schiller had much more prudence and dexterity of management than I;
he was also thinking of his periodical the _Horen_, about this time,
and of course rather wished to attract than repel me. Accordingly he
answered me like an accomplished Kantite; and as my stiff-necked
Realism gave occasion to many contradictions, much battling took place
between us, and at last a truce, in which neither party would consent
to yield the victory, but each held himself invincible. Positions like
the following grieved me to the very soul: _How can there ever be an
experiment, that shall correspond with an idea? The specific quality
of an idea is, that no experiment can reach it or agree with it._ Yet
if he held as an idea, the same thing which I looked upon as an
experiment; there must certainly, I thought, be some community between
us, some ground whereon both of us might meet!'

With Goethe's natural history, or with Kant's philosophy, we have
here no concern, but we can combine the expressions of the two great
poets into a nearly complete description of poetry. The 'symbolic
plant' is the _type_ of which we speak, the ideal at which inferior
specimens aim, the class-characteristic in which they all share, but
which none shows forth fully: Goethe was right in searching for this
in reality and nature; Schiller was right in saying that it was an
'idea', a transcending notion to which approximations could be found
in experience, but only approximations--which could not be found there
itself. Goethe, as a poet, rightly felt the primary necessity of
outward suggestion and experience; Schiller as a philosopher, rightly
felt its imperfection.

But in these delicate matters, it is easy to misapprehend. There is,
undoubtedly, a sort of poetry which is produced as it were out of the
author's mind. The description of the poet's own moods and feelings is
a common sort of poetry--perhaps the commonest sort. But the
peculiarity of such cases is, that the poet does not describe himself
_as_ h