sures of the jewelled skies" be an offense
against truth, it is not, poets would say, because of his
non-conformance to the so-called facts of astronomy, but because his
sense of beauty is at fault, leading him to prefer prettiness to
sublimity. As for the poet's visions, of naiad and dryad, which the
philosopher avers are less true than chemical and physical forces, they
represent the hidden truth of beauty, which is threaded through the ugly
medley of life, being invisible till under the light of the poet's
thought it flashes out like a pattern in golden thread, woven through a
somber tapestry.

It is only when the poet is not keenly alive to beauty that he begins to
fret about making an artificial connection between truth and beauty, or,
as he is apt to rename them, between wisdom and fancy. In the eighteenth
century when the poet's vision of truth became one with the scientist's,
he could not conceive of beauty otherwise than as gaudy ornaments,
"fancies," with which he might trim up his thoughts. The befuddled
conception lasted over into the romantic period; Beattie [Footnote: See
_The Minstrel_.] and Bowles [Footnote: See _The Visionary Boy_.] both
warned their poets to include both fancy and wisdom in their poetry.
Even Landor reflected,

A marsh, where only flat leaves lie,
And showing but the broken sky
Too surely is the sweetest lay
That wins the ear and wastes the day
Where youthful Fancy pouts alone
And lets not wisdom touch her zone.
[Footnote: See _To Wordsworth_.]

But the poet whose sense of beauty is unerring gives no heed to such
distinctions.

If the scientist scoffs at the poet's intuitive selection of ideal
values, declaring that he might just as well take any other aspect of
things--their number, solidarity, edibleness--instead of beauty, for his
test of their reality, the poet has his answer ready. After all, this
poet, this dreamer, is a pragmatist at heart. To the scientist's charge
that his test is absurd, his answer is simply, It works.

The world is coming to acknowledge, little by little, the poet points
out, that whatever he presents to it as beauty is likewise truth. "The
poet's wish is nature's law," [Footnote: _Poem Outlines_.] says Sidney
Lanier, and other poets, no less, assert that the poet is in unison with
nature. Wordsworth calls poetry "a force, like one of nature's."
[Footnote: _The Prelude_.] One of Oscar Wilde's cleverest paradoxes is
to the effect that nat