work done is no measure of his
strength. A dwarf behind his steam-engine may remove mountains; but no
dwarf will hew them down with a pickaxe; and he must be a Titan that
hurls them abroad with his arms.

"It is in this last shape that Burns presents himself.... Impelled
by the expansive movement of his own irrepressible soul, he struggles
forward into the general view; and with haughty modesty lays down
before us, as the fruit of his labor, a gift, which Time has now
pronounced imperishable."

But why should one read poetry, at all, where there is so much good
prose to be read? Herbert Spencer in his essay on "Style" gives some
reasons for the superiority of poetry to prose. He says:

"Poetry, we shall find, habitually adopts those symbols of thought
and those methods of using them which instinct and analysis agree in
choosing, as most effective, and becomes poetry by virtue of doing
this.

"Thus, poetry, regarded as a vehicle of thought, is especially
impressive, partly because it obeys all the laws of effective speech
and partly because in so doing it imitates the natural utterances
of excitement. While the matter embodied is idealized emotion, the
vehicle is the idealized language of emotion. As the musical composer
catches the cadences in which our feelings of joy and sympathy, grief
and despair, vent themselves, and out of these germs evolves melodies
suggesting higher phases of these feelings; so the poet develops from
the typical expressions in which men utter passion and sentiments
those choice forms of verbal combination in which concentrated passion
and sentiment may be fitly presented."

And the language which Spencer regards as the "most effective" is
tersely set forth by that poetic and spiritual preacher, Frederick
W. Robertson, in his idea of poetry: "The natural language of excited
feeling, and a work of imagination wrought into form by art."

Another point in connection with the language of poetry is that,
compelled by their limitations of rhythm, rhyme, and the compression
of much thought and feeling into brief space, the poets have become
the finest artists in the use of words. The examples of word-use in
the dictionaries are largely drawn from the poets. Joseph Joubert, the
French epigrammatist, says:

"Like the nectar of the bee, which turns to honey the dust of flowers,
or like that liquor which converts lead into gold, the poet has a
breath that fills out words, gives them light and colo