You may discover the same quality in such books as Spencer's _First
Principles_. You may discover it everywhere in literature, from the
cold fire of Pope's irony to the blasting temperatures of Swinburne.
Literature does not begin till emotion has begun.
There is even no essential, definable difference between those two
great branches, prose and poetry. For prose may have rhythm. All
that can be said is that verse will scan, while prose will not. The
difference is purely formal. Very few poets have succeeded in being so
poetical as Isaiah, Sir Thomas Browne, and Ruskin have been in
prose. It can only be stated that, as a rule, writers have shown an
instinctive tendency to choose verse for the expression of the very
highest emotion. The supreme literature is in verse, but the finest
achievements in prose approach so nearly to the finest achievements in
verse that it is ill work deciding between them. In the sense in which
poetry is best understood, all literature is poetry--or is, at
any rate, poetical in quality. Macaulay's ill-informed and unjust
denunciations live because his genuine emotion made them into poetry,
while his _Lays of Ancient Rome_ are dead because they are not the
expression of a genuine emotion.
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