The genius of prose is essentially different from the "genius of poetry;" and that is the reason why writers like De Quincy and Ruskin trespassed, as thieves do, on forbidden ground. It is much better to pick forbidden fruit and to eat thereof, and be as stealthy as the traveler in Blake's deliciously wicked poem who steals from the unloved lover the woman he loves:
Soon after she has gone from me A traveller came by, Silently, invisibly: He took her with a sigh.
The moral of it is "Never seek to sell thy love;" but such writers as those I have referred to tread fallen fruit ruthlessly under foot and therefore ought to be thrust out of the garden they have robbed. Both tried to write prose as if they were writing verse, and both failed; Ruskin ruined by his fatal facility and De Quincy by his cultivating eloquence in rhetoric. Certain prose writers have written lyrical prose, because their genius at times drove them to do so, and with an absolute success. One finds such passages in Shakespeare and Blake and Pater and Lamb; in certain pages of Balzac and of Flaubert and of Meredith and of Conrad. Yet, in what I must call lyrical prose, there is a certain rhythm, but not that of rhymed verse; that is to say, if the inspiration were the same, the mediums are different: the rhythm of prose that has no meter and the rhythm of verse that has meter.
Take, for instance, Peacock, who was neither a great prose writer nor a great poet, but whose novels are unique in English, and are among the most scholarly, original and entertaining prose writings of the century.
A strain too learned for a shallow age, Too wide for selfish bigots, let his page Which charms the chosen spirits of the time Fold itself up for the serener clime Of years to come, and find its recompense In that just expectation.
So Shelley praises him, who was certainly aware of Peacock's clever scraps of rhyming that are like no other verse; the masterpiece being the comically heroic _War-Song of Dinar Valor_, which the author defines as "the quintessence of all war songs that were ever written, and the sum and substances of all the appetences, tendencies and consequences of military." This learned wit, his satire upon the vulgarity of progress (in which he is one with Baudelaire and one with Meredith) are more continuously present in his prose than in his verse; yet his characters are caricatures, they speak a language that is not ours; they are given sensational adventures, often comical in the extreme; and in these pages plenty of nonsense and of laughter and of satire and of serious prose with an undercurrent of bitter cynicism. He treats all his creatures cruelly, and I can not help seeing the reason why Richard Garnett admired his prose so much: that there is something curiously alike and unlike in their humor.