Let such bethink them, if the sleepy drench
Of that forgetful lake benumb not still,
That in our proper motion we ascend
Up to our native seat; descent and fall
To us are adverse:
—these speak of the majesty of the soul; but the other only of the bitterness of the personality.
But you will say, Tennyson was putting words into the mouth of a very human, limited personality; and so the piece is more artistic as it is, and would be inappropriate otherwise. These are the words she actually would have said. True. The personality does speak in prose. Prose is the language of personality; and no doubt it was first invented when first the souls rayed out personalities from themselves; no doubt poetry is the older, as it is the more august. So the style used in The Princess is suitable, well-chosen, artistic; it fits the subject admirably; which proves that the subject is essentially a prose one. For prose—history, philosophy, criticism—examines and criticises life from without; but poetry illumines it from within. Prose considers and passes judgment on the external, the seeming, the current: Poetry dwells within the holy of holies and her whole burden is the story of the Soul.
If she looks outward at all—and she does that too, at times—it is from her own standpoint, and in the eternal manner. She does not then criticise; her tones do not mince nor falter. The bardic schools had a law, that the office of the Bard was solely to extol what was noble; there were other orders, not sacred like the bardic, whose business was to satirize or to amuse. One can see that such a law must have come from a time when that one force which, as was said above, alone can move poetry to anger absolute, was not in evidence: for, except that they must fight that force, that old law holds for the bards now. So poetry, looking down into this world, criticises no one and nothing. She exalts whom she will; she mantles humanity with godhood: and whom she will—the antihumanists, the plotters against the freedom and beauty of the soul—she thunders upon.
Swinburne, looking at the roadside crucifix ghastly in its deification of decay and death, criticises that—nay, scourges the idea it symbolizes, the soul-fettering dogmatism; pours on it the hate of hate, the scorn of scorn, if you like—but it is because the awful vision of the real Crucified burns up before him; the tragedy of the ages, the enslaved, thwarted, hindered, persecuted Soul of Man. Dante beholds the severe mercy of the Great Law, "that straightens us, whom the world has made crooked." Milton, vainly endeavoring to be orthodox, to write within the limits of the dogmas, justifying the ways of his strange deity, and holding up Satan for our abhorrence, gives way to the great spirit of the Poet within him time and again; and shows, time and again, the sublime pathos of the Soul, Unchanged, though fallen on evil days. Nay, but they do not tell of these things; they make them live; they are revelations shown before us; so that our own eyes have seen, and the universe has undergone transfiguration, and ourselves. For Poetry is no little thing, no mere refinement. It is magic; it is the life of the Gods; it is the secret and spiritual nature of things. Without it, this Universe like a rotten bough, would break off from the Tree of Life. Without it, there would be no Tree of Life. It is the living sap, the greenness, the subtle vigor, and the beauty of the Tree.