The Literature of Ecstasy
easily recall expressions or passages in works of pure science which have given him the same pleasure which he seeks in professed poets."

Emerson also said he heard the Germans considered the author of _Tristram Shandy_ a greater poet than Cowper, and that Goldsmith was a poet more because of the _Vicar of Wakefield_ than the _Deserted Village_.

Hazlitt stated that there were some prose works that approached poetry without absolutely being poetry, instancing _Robinson Crusoe_, _Pilgrim's Progress_, and the _Decameron_.

Heine spoke of _Don Quixote_ as a poem. Fredrick Schlegel called _Wilhelm Meister_ poetry. Brandes regards Lord Beaconsfield a poet. Matthew Arnold characterized Chateaubriand, Senancour and Guérin poets. Balzac considered himself a poet and Ibsen in mentioning his prose dramas often used the word "poems."

The habit of calling productions in metre or rhythm poetry has been so strongly ingrained in us that we denominate every lengthy performance in verse a poem _in toto_. Before Poe, Coleridge said that "a poem of any length neither can be nor ought to be all poetry." Poe gave us the reasons for this proposition and demonstrated to us that a long epic poem is but a series of short poems connected by uninspired passages in metre. The same thing may be said of literary verse performances of moderate length. To those who object to using the word "poem" in connection with any prose composition one may reply that these, like verse productions, are also often made up of poetical parts here and there; they simply lack regular rhythm and this is not a sufficient line of demarcation as to what constitutes poetry and what does not.

There are many short stories in verse which are known as poems while there are many poetical tales and sketches in prose which no one finds to be poetry, although they often contain more of it than many specimens in measure. I think Poe's _Eleonora_ with its description of the Valley of Many Colored Grass and Hawthorne's _Haunted Mind_ are greater poems, though in prose, than most of Holmes' and Bryant's verse poems are. I see no reason why we should not designate as poetry, prose tales where ecstasy and emotion predominate. Kipling's _Brushwood Boy_ or Bret Harte's _Outcasts of Poker Flat_ is as poetical, I believe, as any tale in Longfellow's _Tales of a Wayside Inn_. The same laws of emotional appeal are working in the one as in the other; a similar artistic stamp is printed on all these stories. In fact, Longfellow's tales are inferior in the quality and quantity of poetry to the 
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