ycidas for instance, the thought, the
logical structure:--how wholesome! how delightful! as to identify in
prose what we call the poetry, the imaginative power, not treating it
as out of place and a kind of vagrant intruder, but by way of an
estimate of its rights, that is, of its achieved powers, there.

[7] Dryden, with the characteristic instinct of his age, loved to
emphasise the distinction between poetry and prose, the protest against
their confusion with each other, coming with somewhat diminished effect
from one whose poetry was so prosaic. In truth, his sense of prosaic
excellence affected his verse rather than his prose, which is not only
fervid, richly figured, poetic, as we say, but vitiated, all
unconsciously, by many a scanning line. Setting up correctness, that
humble merit of prose, as the central literary excellence, he is really
a less correct writer than he may seem, still with an imperfect mastery
of the relative pronoun. It might have been foreseen that, in the
rotations of mind, the province of poetry in prose would find its
assertor; and, a century after Dryden, amid very different intellectual
needs, and with the need therefore of great modifications in literary
form, the range of the poetic force in literature was effectively
enlarged by Wordsworth. The true distinction between prose and poetry
he regarded as the almost technical or accidental one of the absence or
presence of metrical beauty, or, say! metrical restraint; and for him
the opposition came to be between verse and prose of course; but, as
the essential dichotomy in this matter, between imaginative and
unimaginative writing, parallel to De Quincey's distinction between
"the literature of power and the literature of knowledge," in the
former of which the composer gives us [8] not fact, but his peculiar
sense of fact, whether past or present.

Dismissing then, under sanction of Wordsworth, that harsher opposition
of poetry to prose, as savouring in fact of the arbitrary psychology of
the last century, and with it the prejudice that there can be but one
only beauty of prose style, I propose here to point out certain
qualities of all literature as a fine art, which, if they apply to the
literature of fact, apply still more to the literature of the
imaginative sense of fact, while they apply indifferently to verse and
prose, so far as either is really imaginative--certain conditions of
true art in both alike, which conditions may als