The prose meaning to be told in the fourth line is simply, I was born in the North. Tennyson, evidently wishing to occasion some incidental delight to the reader's mind, manages to give the line quite an imaginative turn by casting it in this form :

For on my cradle shone the Northern star.

A little later Tennyson makes the Prince tell of setting out secretly, within a fortnight of his repulse, for the home of the Princess. The allusion to this small interval of waiting might, one could suppose, have been well enough expressed in this way:

Then, ere two weeks had passed, I stole from court. But what Tennyson really makes his love-sick hero say, to make known this baldest of prose circumstances, is nothing less (I. 100, 101) than this:

Then, ere the silver sickle of that month

Became her golden shield, I stole from court.

In Canto IV., where the narrative reaches the collapse of the Prince's scheme, another notable illustration occurs. The Prince, having rescued the Princess from drowning, and scaled the palace gates, walks up and down the esplanade some two hours or more. Tennyson makes him measure to us this lapse of time, not in denominations of the clock, but of imagination and of the feelings (IV. 194, 195), thus:—

I paced the terrace, till the Bear had wheeled
Through a great arc his seven slow suns.

There are numberless examples of the same thing, in lines and parts of lines, throughout The Princess and other specimens of Tennyson's most careful work. There

are illustrations rather neater and perhaps more numerous in Mrs. Browning. Shakespeare, and Milton, and Vergil, we shall remember, are adepts in the same craftmanship. For more thorough-going evincements, it will be enough to try some rhetorical experiments with the prose-poetic examples ventured under the last head. If a way can be found to indite such utterances edifyingly, the utmost consequences of the principle laid down must be allowed. Nothing surely could seem more hopelessly unæsthetic, or more irremediably barren of spiritual meaning, than a sentence like

It rained this afternoon for quite a while.

But, understanding the line to have had reference, as is true, to a shower in a certain city, where the storm sewers drain the surface water of twenty-four square miles, and bring the river more inflow for the time being than any half-dozen of its head streams, we get a hint of sufficient dignity to rewrite thus:—

The river-sources shifted to our roofs

For thrice an hour.

The second prose-poetic line,

I have not seen him since he was a boy,

though even more devoid of edifying sense, may be approximately redeemed and reinforced after this fashion:Enhancing years have lifted up the child, Through some six feet of stature, to bold looks, And virile beard, since last we met.

The next example,—

I knew no reason why her eyesight failed,—

is not so easy, but might be retold philosophically, if not poetically, in this way:

Her eyes were vacant to the sun and stars;

No blighting touch I saw.

Finally, we come to the rhymed lines, cast, as will scarcely have been forgotten, in the orthodox Popëan

manner,

The days nave grown so very long of late,

Street lamps are lighted now at half-past eight.

Even this, in its turn, may be exalted by larger suggestiveness of its ultimate and involved meanings, although the rhyme, which will be little missed, must be given up: At summer solstice now the sunsets lag, And streets are twilight-lit till curfew time.

Imagination may be engaged by truths as well as by aspects of beauty, as these examples show. How that may be, and what is the law of its double activity, must be the subjects of the next inquiry.

III.

There are but three things upon which literature may be founded, or of which constructed: Facts, Truths, and Aspects or Experiences of Beauty.

Perhaps it has never occurred to us that literature cannot be compiled or composed out of facts as such. Were that possible, then would a book of logarithms, or The Nautical Almanac, be literature pre-eminently. daily newspaper is made up largely of public happenings, told as annals, and never rises to the rank of literature

The

because of this fact-preponderance of material. In the editorial and correspondence columns there is matter of a different sort, which sometimes mounts to the dignity and value of true literature. What must editorial writers and correspondents do to impart this permanent quality to their work? They must write with curious care," says one. But what is it to write with curious care? The critic who is responsible for the answer just quoted is, to be sure, a producer of literature, yet does himself scant justice in professing to be merely an ingenious maker of phrases. Vergil, we may say, wrought literature according to Stopford Brooke's theory, as Dante also did, and Milton and Gray, and Rogers and Tennyson, as also Burke, and Macaulay, and Walter Pater. But Shakespeare, and Bunyan, and Browning, and Carlyle have been literature-makers not less, yet cannot be said to have written with much curious care. If it were insisted that even Browning and Carlyle are not exceptions, then let us take Walt Whitman. Here is a man that will be admitted to have made some literature, but with curious carelessness rather than curious care. Few, probably, will insist that the carlessness is more than incidental, or deny that his success has been due to message, all in spite of rather than in consequence of the formlessness of form. In like manner must it be finally agreed that even curious care never constitutes in itself the message, but is only an incident or an ornament of the vehicle bringing it. There are men who have written with very much of carefulness indeed, our college students sometimes do that, yet without the least success in making literature, or discovering the secret of its power,

That which newspaper editors and correspondents must do to produce what shall be worth reprinting and making permanent in books is precisely what everybody else must do to gain admittance to the noble throng who are making the literature of the world. They must deal with facts as the raw material, the occasion, of their work, but they must do something more than set forth facts brilliantly or glibly. They must accomplish what historians achieve when they transform annals into history, what Emerson and Hawthorne do when they sit down to write,-bring to the surface the underlying significance of the facts. This is nothing less than what is often called Interpretation, which is the process of discovering to consciousness the type-qualities involved in any given happening or object. Facts address the intellect, and are of small significance unless or until interpreted. The quantum of life that men actually live is registered in the sum of their experiences upon this plane. It is only when men find Truth, or Beauty, or facts potential of these, that they are inspired to write. If I draw a triangle, and by nice.

mechanical measurements ascertain that the sum of its angles equals two right angles, I establish a fact which I am prompted to tell, perhaps, but not to write a book about, or send report of to the papers. But if I chance to discover that the angles of every triangle are always equal to two right angles, I have achieved a Truth, and if it be new, -no matter were I Euclid, and publishing were as difficult and costly as in his day, I cannot but give it to the world. The impulse would be the same if I

had discovered a new principle in education, or economics, The fact or instance by way of which the

or sociology.