_Republic_ and other dialogues, Bacon's _Essays_, Schopenhauer's _World as Will and Idea_, Nietzsche's _Thus Spake Zarathustra_, Emerson's _Essays_, in critical works like Pater's _Renaissance_, Ruskin's _Modern Painters_, Wilde's _Intentions_, in histories like Thucydides's _Peloponnesian War_ and Carlyle's _French Revolution_, in autobiographies like St. Augustine's _Confessions_ and Rousseau's _Confessions_, in letters like Madame Lespinasse's and Mrs. Browning's, in diaries like those of Amiel, in novels by Balzac, Dickens, Hawthorne, Hardy, Tolstoy, etc.Some of the best poetry is found in the world's prose fiction. For example, _The Scarlet Letter_ has as good poetry in it as the _Aeneid_. Like the old epic, it is made up of great poems connected by extended portions that belongs to general literature, sections that have not enough emotion to be regarded as poetry nor are yet arid or passionless enough to be termed science. But the story of Hester Prynne is poetry as truly as the tale of Dido, and undoubtedly you cannot refuse the appellation poetry to the chapter in Hawthorne's novel which describes how Arthur Dimmesdale gets up in the pulpit and confesses to the congregation his part in Hester Prynne's guilt. The _Aeneid_ is really a novel in verse.

We are not often moved by metrical writing as we are by the last part of the chapter in _David Copperfield_ entitled, "A Greater Loss," where we see the agonizing grief of the elder Pegotty and of Ham over the elopement of Emily, Ham's betrothed. You recall the love scene telling of the meeting of Richard and Lucy in Meredith's novel _The Ordeal of Richard Feverel_, only as poetry. This is how the passage, which being rhythmical besides, begins:

Golden lie the meadows; golden run the streams; red gold is on the pine-stems. The sun is coming down to earth, and walks the fields and the waters. The sun is coming down to earth, and the fields and the waters shout to him golden shouts. He comes and his heralds run before him, and touch the leaves of oaks and the planes and the beeches lucid green, and the pine stems redder gold; leaving the brightest footprints upon thickly-weeded barks, where the foxglove's last upper-bells incline, and the bramble shoots wander amid moist rich herbage, etc.

If the sphere of poetry has thus been widened to include many compositions in prose formerly excluded, it has, on the other hand, been narrowed by omitting much in verse that was formerly admitted into the domain of the Muses. I refer especially to the whole body of unecstatic philosophical, scientific and theological discourses in verse which usurp a name not 

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