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Updated: June 27, 2025
So writes the most powerful of English prose-writers. And this hope and desire, which is reason, once thrown down, the most powerful among poets has brought from human lips this estimate of life "It is a tale Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, Signifying nothing."
We ask the question of our prose-writers themselves what do they lose in Molière's poetry? Does wine we beg pardon for another trivial illustration does wine cease to be wine when it is bottled?
On Poe I find the following notes: "The characters drawn of Poe by his various biographers and critics may with safety be pronounced an excess of exaggeration, but this is not to be much wondered at when it is considered that these men were his rivals, either as poets or prose-writers, and it is well known that such are generally as jealous of each other as are the ladies who are handsome of those who desire to be considered so.
It is pre-eminently and especially an instrument. It has been evolved by a man whose passion it is to communicate his reflections, to make himself understood. He has learnt the practice of good writing through this desire and not by any sick languishing to construct beautiful mosaics or melodious descriptions. The English are not a nation of prose-writers.
By his philosophical method, powerful and logical, as well as by the clear, strong, and concise style he made use of to expound it, Descartes accomplished the transition from the sixteenth century to the seventeeth; he was the first of the great prose-writers of that incomparable epoch, which laid forever the foundations of the language.
Prose-writers have been more sensitively attached to their glaring blunders in verifiable facts than was this very sensitive poet to his occasional lapses in taste. The Lady of Shalott, even in its early form, was more than enough to give assurance of a poet.
For obvious reasons, the question is one that must be decided by reference to prose-writers, and not poets; and it is, we think, pretty well settled that more words of Latin original were brought into the language in the century between 1550 and 1650 than in the whole period before or since, and for the simple reason, that they were absolutely needful to express new modes and combinations of thought.
Had he written only "Faust," he would be the first of philosophic poets. Had he written only "Hermann and Dorothea," the sweetest idyllist; if only the "Märchen," the subtlest of allegorists. Had he written never a verse, but only prose, he would hold the highest place among the prose-writers of Germany.
Prose and poetry stood at the two opposite poles of their cycle; and thus it is that, while the poets and prose-writers of the Ciceronian age are equally imperishable in fame, the latter but represent the culmination of a broad and harmonious development, while of the former, amidst but apart from the beginnings of a new literary era, there shine, splendid like stars out of the darkness, the two immortal lights of Lucretius and Catullus.
Regarded merely as a piece of poetical prose, 1 Cor. xiii. is finer than anything that had been written in the Greek language since the great Attic prose-writers. And if this was dictated impromptu, similar outbursts of splendid eloquence were probably frequent in his mission-preaching.
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