glyphs of Egypt, may be cited as examples of literary meaning conveyed with no implicit help from the spoken word. Such an art, were it capable of high development, would forsake the kinship of melody, and depend for its sensual elements of delight on the laws of decorative pattern. In a land of deaf-mutes it might come to a measure of perfection. But where human intercourse is chiefly by speech, its connexion with the interests and passions of daily life would perforce be of the feeblest, it would tend more and more to cast off the fetters of meaning that it might do freer service to the jealous god of visible beauty. The overpowering rivalry of speech would rob it of all its symbolic intent and leave its bare picture. Literature has favoured rather the way of the ear and has given itself zealously to the tuneful ordering of sounds. Let it be repeated, therefore, that for the traffic of letters the senses are but the door-keepers of the mind; none of them commands an only way of access,the deaf can read by sight, the blind by touch. It is not amid the bustle of the live senses, but in

The Functions of

Sense.

an under-world of dead impressions that Poetry works her will, raising that in power which was sown in weakness, quickening a spiritual body from the ashes of the natural body. The mind of man is peopled, like some silent city, with a sleeping company of reminiscences, associations, impressions, attitudes, emotions, to be awakened into fierce activity at the touch of words. By one way or another, with a fanfaronnade of the marching trumpets, or stealthily, by noiseless passages and dark posterns, the troop of suggesters enters the citadel, to do its work within. The procession of beautiful sounds that is a poem passes in through the main gate, and forthwith the by-ways resound to the hurry of ghostly feet, until the small company of adventurers is wellnigh lost and overwhelmed in that throng of insurgent spirits.

To attempt to reduce the art of literature to its component sense-elements is therefore vain. Memory, "the warder of the brain," is a fickle trustee, whimsically lavish to strangers, giving up to the appeal of a spoken word or unspoken

symbol, an odour or a touch, all that has been
garnered by the sensitive capacities of man. It is
the part of the writer to play upon memory, con-
fusing what belongs to one sense with what
belongs to another, extorting images of colour at
a word, raising ideas of harmony without break-
ing the stillness of the air. He can lead on the
dance of words till their sinuous movements call
forth, as if by mesmerism, the likeness of some
adamantine rigidity, time is converted into space,
and music begets sculpture. To see for the sake
of seeing, to hear for the sake of hearing, are
subsidiary exercises of his complex metaphysical
art, to be counted among its rudiments. Picture
and music can furnish but the faint beginnings of
a philosophy of letters. Necessary though they
be to a writer, they are transmuted in his service
to new forms, and made to further purposes not
their own.
The of vision-hardly can a writer, least
power
of all if he be a poet, forego that part of his
equipment. In dealing with the impalpable, dim
subjects that lie beyond the border-land of exact

Picture.

knowledge, the poetic instinct seeks always to bring them into clear definition and bright concrete imagery, so that it might seem for the moment as if painting also could deal with them. Every abstract conception, as it passes into the light of the creative imagination, acquires structure and firmness and colour, as flowers do in the light of the sun. Life and Death, Love and Youth, Hope and Time, become persons in poetry, not that they may wear the tawdry habiliments of the studio, but because persons are the objects of the most familiar sympathy and the most intimate knowledge.

How long, O Death? And shall thy feet depart

Still a young child's with mine, or wilt thou stand Full grown the helpful daughter of my heart,

What time with thee indeed I reach the strand Of the pale wave which knows thee what thou art, And drink it in the hollow of thy hand?

And as a keen eye for the imagery attendant on a word is essential to all writing, whether prose or poetry, that attempts the heart, so languor of the visual faculty can work disaster even in the calm periods of philosophic expatiation. "It

cannot be doubted," says one whose daily meditations enrich The People's Post-Bag, "that Fear is, to a great extent, the mother of Cruelty." Alas, by the introduction of that brief proviso, conceived in a spirit of admirably cautious selfdefence, the writer has unwittingly given himself to the horns of a dilemma whose ferocity nothing can mitigate. These tempered and conditional truths are not in nature, which decrees, with uncompromising dogmatism, that either a woman is one's mother, or she is not. The writer probably meant merely that "fear is one of the causes of cruelty," and had he used a colourless abstract word the platitude might pass unchallenged. But a vague desire for the emphasis and glamour of literature having brought in the word "mother," has yet failed to set the sluggish imagination to work, and a word so glowing with picture and vivid with sentiment is damped and dulled by the thumb-mark of besotted usage to mean no more than " cause or "occasion." Only for the poet, perhaps, are words live winged things, flashing with colour and laden with scent; yet one poor