"Pope," said Hazlitt, "had none of the enthusiasm of poetry; he was in poetry what the sceptic is in religion."[356] This was a creed he sometimes avowed. "Poetry and criticism," he said in the preface to his works, "are only the affair of idle men who write in their closets, and of idle men who read there."[357] He talked later of his "idle songs," but in the same breath, with characteristic inconsistency, he set up to be the moral reformer of his age, and had undertaken a little before "to vindicate" in verse "the ways of God to man."[358] His views of his art are contradictory and irreconcileable. His disparagement of it was an affectation founded upon a common definition of poetry, that its end was to please. The premise, false from its incompleteness, led to degrading conclusions. Hurd, who studied poetry for the purpose of analysing its ingredients, and who should have known its true properties, adopted the usual pleasure theory, and at thirty-seven he was naturally ashamed of his frivolous pursuit. "He must not," he said, "pass more of his life in these flowery regions; the light food was not the proper nourishment of age." Verse was the amusement of youth, and unless very sparingly used, was unbecoming the gravity of mature minds.[359] Milton had another conception of the office of poetry, and he avowed that his purpose was "to inbreed and cherish in a great people whatsoever in religion is holy and sublime, in virtue amiable or grave." Wordsworth was of Milton's school. His aim was, "to make men wiser, better, and happier." "Every great poet," he said, "is a teacher; I wish to be considered as a teacher or as nothing."[360] The right doctrine was enforced by a critic whom Pope despised. "Poetry," wrote Dennis, "has two ends,--a subordinate and a final one: the subordinate one is pleasure, and the final one is instruction."[361] He had the sanction of Lord Bacon, who declared that "poesy" had three uses, of which two were to inculcate morality and heroism; the third alone was for "delectation."[362] Aristotle long before had contended that poetry was a more effective school of virtue than philosophy, and Horace avowed his conviction that right and wrong were taught better by Homer than by the sages. The least reflection upon the range of the noblest poetry must satisfy anybody that entertainment is its smallest function. The poet has the world of external things from which to cull his pictures. He gives definiteness to what was vague, fixes what was transitory, detects delightful resemblances, and brings to view unnoticed beauties. He invests the realities with the thoughts of his impassioned mind, creating in us sentiments, and supplying us with associations which we should not have derived from the actual objects. Nature, in itself enchanting, has meanings for us which were never dreamt of till we saw it through the medium of the poet's representations. He has the world of mankind for his province. He can take us the circuit of the passions; he can summon them from the inner recesses of the soul, and set them in open array; he can assign to each its rightful force, stripping corruption of its disguises, and displaying what is lovely in its unadulterated lustre. He can soar at pleasure into loftier regions, and when his main theme lies in a lower sphere can link it, openly or by implication, to the world of spirits,--to the divinity and the divine. Verse abounds in the strains which lift the soul to heaven, or bring down heaven to glorify earth, and sustain its weakness and woes. In a word, the poet treats of nature, man, the superhuman, and treats of them in a way which dilates our faculties and feelings, till through the contemplation of the ideal we attain to a grander real. "Poesy," says Lord Bacon, "was ever thought to have some participation of divineness, because it doth raise and erect the mind, by submitting the shows of things to the desires of the mind, whereas reason doth buckle and bow the mind unto the nature of things."[363] The domain of high poetry is the sublime, the solemn, the terrible, the pathetic, the tender, the sweet, and the tranquil; the office of poetry is to purify, to ennoble, to humanise, to soften, to soothe, and to delight. Poetry is great, and participates of divineness in proportion as it employs these means, and attains these ends. The dry unprofitable seeds which lurk in the heart, are by poetry quickened into a resplendent growth. Through poetry, obscure vestiges of truth start into distinctness, and flash upon the inward eye. Through poetry, the ethereal elements of the mind, incessantly dissipated and deadened by common concerns, are renewed in their sanctity. In the reach and importance of the lessons no hard prosaic facts can go beyond exalted poetry.