give us the same, if not a greater effect in their prose than the old dramatist did in verse?And I find much poetry, especially in letters, memoirs and biographies. I find poems in biographies like Bisland's Hearn, Meynell's Francis Thompson, Woodberry's Poe, Lawton's Balzac. I give these more or less recent books as examples. The works are full of emotional passages dealing with crucial events in the lives of the subjects. You will find poetry in famous biographies like Moore's Byron, Dowden's Shelley, Forster's Dickens, Cooke's Ruskin, Bielschowsky's Goethe, Froude's Carlyle, etc., to name just the lives of some literary men.

It is particularly pleasing to find poetry in literary prose criticism. For it was always held that criticism was but a secondary art, rarely creative in the same sense as poetry, supposed to be a product of the mind and not the soul, and merely a commentary on poetry. It is true, formerly poets were often inclined to write their criticism in verse, thinking that thus it became poetry. But it is only the ecstatic presentation of critical ideas that makes criticism poetry, whether in prose or verse. Poets have often described the mission of poetry in verse, and given us genuine poems. Horace and Verlaine have done this. But we have had great poetry in the critical work in prose of many critics. You will find poetry in Carlyle, Ruskin, Goethe, Pater, Brandes. You will find it in the prose essays of poets very often in spite of the popular tradition that poets are not good prose writers.

I give two examples. The first is from Swinburne's book on Blake:
To him the veil of outer things seemed always to tremble with some breath behind it; seemed at times to be rent in sunder with clamour and sudden lightning. All the void of earth and air seemed to quiver with the passage of sentient wings and palpitate under the pressure of conscious feet. Flowers and weeds, stars and stones, spoke with articulate lips and gazed with living eyes. Hands were stretched towards him from beyond the darkness of material nature, to tempt or to support, to guide or to restrain. His hardest facts were the vaguest allegories of other men. To him all symbolic things were literal, all literal things symbolic. About his path and about his bed, around his ears and under his eyes, an infinite play of spiritual life seethed and swarmed or shone and sang. Spirits imprisoned in the husk and shell of earth consoled or menaced him. Every leaf bore a growth of angels; the pulse of every minute sounded as the falling foot of God; under the rank raiment of weeds, in the drifting down of thistles, strange faces frowned and white hair fluttered; tempters and allies, 

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