(to stay her steps) has dropped the cub in her
path, but, casting at it a glance of recognition, bounds with a
wilder howl after the robber, the incident is purely bestial, an
exhibition of sheer brute fury, and as such repulsive and most
unpoetical. But let her, instantly drawing her fiery eye from the
robber, stop, and for the infuriated roar utter a growl of leonine
tenderness over her recovered cub, and our sympathy leaps towards her.
Through the red glare of rage there shines suddenly a stream of white
light, gushing from one of the purest fountains: wrathful fury is
suddenly subdued by love. A moment before she was possessed with
savage fierceness, her blood boiling with hate and revenge; now it
glows with a mother's joy. Her nature rises to the highest whereof it
is capable. It is the poetry of animalism.

In the poetical, thought is amplified and ripened, while purified, in
the calm warmth of emotion. From being emotive, poetry draws in more
of the man, and higher, finer powers, than prose. The poetical has,
must have, rotundity. No poet ever had a square head. Prose, in its
naked quality, is to poetry what a skeleton is to a moving,
flesh-and-spirit-endowed body. From the skeleton you can learn
osteology, but neither aesthetics nor human nature. Imaginative prose
partakes of the spiritual character of poetry. When a page is
changed from poetry into prose it is flattened, deadened; when from
prose into poetry it is uplifted, enlivened. You get a something else
and a something more. Reduced to plain prose, the famous passage from
the mouth of Viola in "Twelfth Night" would read somewhat thus: "My
father had a daughter who loved a man and would let no one know of her
love, but concealed it, until her cheek grew pale with grief,
patiently bearing within her bosom the misery of an untold
attachment." Now hear the poet:--

"She never told her love,
But let concealment, like a worm i' the bud,
Feed on her damask cheek: she pined in thought:
And with a green and yellow melancholy
She sat like patience on a monument,
Smiling at grief."

What has been done with the prose statement? Instead of a bare fact we
have a picture, a twofold picture; and this, in its compact, fresh,
rose-tinted vividness, carries the whole into our hearts with a
tenfold success. Through emotional joy we apprehend, as by the light
of an instantaneous ignition, the state of the sufferer. The
prose-report is a