gelow,
_The Star's Monument_; Tupper, _Wordsworth_; Tennyson, _The Poet_;
Swinburne, _The Death of Browning_ (Sonnet V), _A New Year's Ode_;
Edmund Gosse, _Epilogue_; James Russell Lowell, Sonnets XIV and XV on
_Wordsworth's Views of Capital Punishment_; Bayard Taylor, _For the
Bryant Festival_; Emerson, _Saadi_; M. Clemmer, _To Emerson_; Warren
Holden, _Poetry_; P. H. Hayne, _To Emerson_; Edward Dowden, _Emerson_;
Lucy Larcom, _R. W. Emerson_; R. C. Robbins, _Emerson_; Henry Timrod, _A
Vision of Poesy_; G. E. Woodberry, _Ode at the Emerson Centenary_;
Bliss Carman, _In a Copy of Browning_; John Drinkwater, _The Loom of
the Poets_; Richard Middleton, _To an Idle Poet_; Shaemas O'Sheel, _The
Poet Sees that Truth and Passion are One_.]

Here we are, then, at the real point of dispute between the philosopher
and the poet. They claim the same vantage-point from which to overlook
human life. One would think they might peacefully share the same
pinnacle, but as a matter of fact they are continuously jostling one
another. In vain one tries to quiet their contentiousness. Turning to
the most deeply Platonic poets of our period--Coleridge, Wordsworth,
Shelley, Arnold, Emerson,--one may inquire, Does not your description of
the poet precisely tally with Plato's description of the philosopher?
Yes, they aver, but Plato falsified when he named his seer a philosopher
rather than a poet. [Footnote: In rare cases, the poet identifies
himself with the philosopher. See Coleridge, _The Garden of Boccaccio_;
Kirke White, _Lines Written on Reading Some of His Own Earlier Sonnets_;
Bulwer Lytton, _Milton_; George E. Woodberry, _Agathon_.] Surely if the
quarrel may be thus reduced to a matter of terminology, it grows
trivial, but let us see how the case stands.

From one approach the dispute seems to arise from a comparison of
methods. Coleridge praises the truth of Wordsworth's poetry as being

Not learnt, but native, her own natural notes.
[Footnote: _To William Wordsworth_.]

Wordsworth himself boasts over the laborious investigator of facts,

Think you, mid all this mighty sum
Of things forever speaking,
That nothing of itself will come,
We must be ever seeking?
[Footnote: _Expostulation and Reply_.]

But the dispute goes deeper than mere method. The poet's immediate
intuition is superior to the philosopher's toilsome research, he
asserts, because it captures ideality alive, whereas the philosopher can
only kill and di