it:

'Bright messenger of the Celestial Nine, Now in translucent ambience
entombed.'

Celestial Nine is commonplace, but what can a man do in this region of
trivial souls? Soar, my mind! What does "ambience" mean, by the way?
Never mind, if the Sublime is unfettered by literal meaning, all the
better for the Sublime!'

At this the divine and the philosopher turned upon him together, as they
were wont to do every now and then.

'This laxity of terms,' said the professor, 'is unscientific and
unpractical.'

'I am a poet,' said the poet, 'I bow to no narrow machinery of
definitions. Words have a gemlike beauty and colour of their own. They
are _not_ merely the signs of ideas--of thoughts.'

'I wish they were!' groaned the professor. 'They are with us.'

'The idea,' continued the poet, 'must conform to the word, when the word
honours the idea by making use of it. What care I for the conventional,
the threadbare significance? My heart recognises, through the outer
vestment of apparent insanity, the inner adaptability. Soar, my mind!'

'And in this way,' said the professor sternly, 'ignoring the great
principles of classification and generalisation, you let a chaos of
disordered ideas abroad upon the universe, destroying all method and
definite arrangement and retarding the great progress of Evolution!'

'A jewel-like word, a transfigured phrase,' replied the poet, 'is
worth all your scientific dictionaries and logic threshing-machines put
together. Ruskin was in error. He tells us that Milton always meant what
he said, and said exactly what he meant.

'This had been an ignoble exactitude. How can a man whose words are
unbounded confine himself within the limits of an intellectual bound?

How can he, that is to say, know exactly what he means, in words, or
mean exactly what, to souls less gloriously chaotic, his words appear to
express? I have always felt this an insuperable difficulty.'

'I have no doubt of it,' said the professor ironically. 'Now,' he went
on, turning to the theologian, 'you see what comes of having too much
soul. It is impossible but that such fixed attention to any one organ
should prove injurious, even if the organ is not there. You really have
a great deal to answer for, in encouraging this kind of monomania.'

'Not a bit of it,' said the theologian indignantly. 'It comes of not
having soul enough, or of allowing the sway the soul should exercise
to fall upon the feeble sceptre of imagin