religion is wholly devoid of external forms; even the
Mahometan who renounces the use of pictures and images has a temple in
which he worships the Most High, as solemn and beautiful as any Greek or
Christian building. Feeling too and thought are not really opposed; for
he who thinks must feel before he can execute. And the highest thoughts,
when they become familiarized to us, are always tending to pass into the
form of feeling.

Plato does not seriously intend to expel poets from life and society.
But he feels strongly the unreality of their writings; he is protesting
against the degeneracy of poetry in his own day as we might protest
against the want of serious purpose in modern fiction, against the
unseemliness or extravagance of some of our poets or novelists,
against the time-serving of preachers or public writers, against the
regardlessness of truth which to the eye of the philosopher seems to
characterize the greater part of the world. For we too have reason to
complain that our poets and novelists 'paint inferior truth' and 'are
concerned with the inferior part of the soul'; that the readers of them
become what they read and are injuriously affected by them. And we look
in vain for that healthy atmosphere of which Plato speaks,--'the beauty
which meets the sense like a breeze and imperceptibly draws the soul,
even in childhood, into harmony with the beauty of reason.'

For there might be a poetry which would be the hymn of divine
perfection, the harmony of goodness and truth among men: a strain which
should renew the youth of the world, and bring back the ages in which
the poet was man's only teacher and best friend,--which would find
materials in the living present as well as in the romance of the
past, and might subdue to the fairest forms of speech and verse the
intractable materials of modern civilisation,--which might elicit the
simple principles, or, as Plato would have called them, the essential
forms, of truth and justice out of the variety of opinion and the
complexity of modern society,--which would preserve all the good of each
generation and leave the bad unsung,--which should be based not on vain
longings or faint imaginings, but on a clear insight into the nature of
man. Then the tale of love might begin again in poetry or prose, two in
one, united in the pursuit of knowledge, or the service of God and man;
and feelings of love might still be the incentive to great thoughts
and heroic deeds as in