Abbey, in which he tells us he hears in nature the still, sad music of humanity. The entire passage is great poetry, not because of the blank verse but because of the mystical pantheistic ecstasy.

Sane mystical poetry may then be of a very high order. You will find examples of it in Blake, Emerson, Tennyson, and Matthew Arnold. Shelley's _Hymn to Intellectual Beauty_, Browning's _Rabbi Ben Ezra_, Whitman's _Chanting the Square Deific_ and Swinburne's _Hertha_ are great mystical poems. These and others will be found in the _Oxford Book of Mystical Verse_, collected by D. H. S. Nicholson and A. H. E. Lee.

Some years ago Arthur Machen produced a curious and illogical book, _Hieroglyphics_, where he touched the borders of the truth of the distinction between the literature of ecstasy and general literature, but he introduced too many unbalanced views about literature being unrelated to life. He was also thinking too exclusively of that religious ecstasy that is found in the Catholic Church only. He also took as his model for an example of ecstasy, _Pickwick Papers_, where there is really little ecstasy, but he found none in _Vanity Fair_ where there is much. He also, strange to relate, found no ecstasy in Meredith or the later Hardy novels, and in no intellectual productions marked with liberal thought except those of Rabelais. He showed no insight into the real greatness of literature, because of his narrow conception of ecstasy.

Ecstasy in the broad sense is any excited condition of the emotions. Besides the meaning the word has in a narrow mystic and a medical sense, with neither of which significances are we here concerned, it is understood generally as referring to any condition where man is overpowered by his feelings. It is this condition which makes the poet write, and the reader is brought into a similar state with the poet by reading the poems. Hence when the prose writer describes his ecstatic state, or draws people into such a state, he is also a poet. The critical or philosophical essay, the novel and short story when ecstatical, are therefore poetry.

It is not necessary that a literary production should be a protracted piece of ecstatical writing.

Many people are under the impression that when we speak of ecstasy we mean a state where reason is utterly dethroned. Yet the Greeks, who make inspiration the source of art, never let the passions so rule that utter chaos resulted in the poet's creation. In Greek literature we have a blending of reason and ecstasy. Professor Butcher has pointed out in his excellent 

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