the supposed fact; it has attached
its emotion to the fact, and now the fact is failing it. But for
poetry the idea is everything; the rest is a world of illusion, of
divine illusion. Poetry attaches its emotion to the idea; the idea is
the fact. The strongest part of our religion to-day is its unconscious
poetry.'

Let me be permitted to quote these words of my own, as uttering the
thought which should, in my opinion, go with us and govern us in all
our study of poetry. In the present work it is the course of one great
contributory stream to the world-river of poetry that we are invited to
follow. We are here invited to trace the stream of English poetry.
But whether we set ourselves, as here, to follow only one of the
several streams that make the mighty river of poetry, or whether we
seek to know them all, our governing thought should be the same. We
should conceive of poetry worthily, and more highly than it has been
the custom to conceive of it. We should conceive of it as capable of
higher uses, and called to higher destinies, than those which in
general men have assigned to it hitherto. More and more mankind will
discover that we have to turn to poetry to interpret life for us, to
console us, to sustain us. Without poetry, our science will appear
incomplete; and most of what now passes with us for religion and
philosophy will be replaced by poetry. Science, I say, will appear
incomplete without it. For finely and truly does Wordsworth call
poetry 'the impassioned expression which is in the countenance of all
science'; and what is a countenance without its expression? Again,
Wordsworth finely and truly calls poetry 'the breath and finer spirit
of all knowledge'; our religion, parading evidences such as those on
which the popular mind relies now; our philosophy, pluming itself on
its reasonings about causation and finite and infinite being; what are
they but the shadows and dreams and false shows of knowledge? The day
will come when we shall wonder at ourselves for having trusted to them,
for having taken them seriously; and the more we perceive their
hollowness, the more we shall prize 'the breath and finer spirit of
knowledge' offered to us by poetry.

But if we conceive thus highly of the destinies of poetry, we must also
set our standard for poetry high, since poetry, to be capable of
fulfilling such high destinies, must be poetry of a high order of
excellence. We must accustom ourselves to a h