ne
To exercise my utmost will is mine,
Be mine mere consciousness: Let men perceive
What I could do, a mastery believe
Asserted and established to the throng
By their selected evidence of song,
Which now shall prove, whate'er they are, or seek
To be, I am.

The claims of the puritans being set aside, the poet must, finally, meet
the objection of his third disputant, the philosopher, the one accuser
whose charges the poet is wont to treat with respect. What validity, the
philosopher asks, can be claimed for apprehension of truth, of the
good-beautiful, secured not through the intellect, but through emotion?
What proof has the poet that feeling is as unerring in detecting the
essential nature of the highest good as is the reason?

There is great variance in the breach between philosophers and poets on
this point. Between the philosopher of purely rationalistic temper, and
the poet who

dares to take
Life's rule from passion craved for passion's sake,
[Footnote: Said of Byron. Wordsworth, _Not in the Lucid Intervals._]

there is absolutely no common ground, of course. Such a poet finds the
rigid ethical system of a rationalistic philosophy as uncharacteristic
of the actual fluidity of the world as ever Cratylus did. Feeling, but
not reason, may be swift enough in its transformations to mirror the
world, such a poet believes, and he imitates the actual flux of things,
not with a wagging of the thumb, like Cratylus, but with a flutter of
the heart. Thus one finds Byron characteristically asserting, "I hold
virtue, in general, or the virtues generally, to be only in the
disposition, each a _feeling,_ not a principle." [Footnote: _Letter to
Charles Dallas,_ January 21, 1808.]

On the other hand, one occasionally meets a point of view as opposite as
that of Poe, who believed that the poet, no less than the philosopher,
is governed by reason solely,--that the poetic imagination is a purely
intellectual function. [Footnote: See the _Southern Literary
Messenger,_ II, 328, April, 1836.]

The philosopher could have no quarrel with him. Between the two extremes
are the more thoughtful of the Victorian poets,--Browning, Tennyson,
Arnold, Clough, whose taste leads them so largely to intellectual
pursuits that it is difficult to say whether their principles of moral
conduct arise from the poetical or the philosophical part of their
natures.

The most profound utterances