but that the spirit of its form shall communicate itself to
the very disguise, and indicate the shape it hides from the manner in
which it is worn. A majestic form and graceful motions will express
themselves through the most barbarous and tasteless costume. Few poets
of the highest class have chosen to exhibit the beauty of their
conceptions in its naked truth and splendour; and it is doubtful
whether the alloy of costume, habit, &c., be not necessary to temper
this planetary music for mortal ears.

The whole objection, however, of the immorality of poetry rests upon a
misconception of the manner in which poetry acts to produce the moral
improvement of man. Ethical science arranges the elements which poetry
has created, and propounds schemes and proposes examples of civil and
domestic life: nor is it for want of admirable doctrines that men
hate, and despise, and censure, and deceive, and subjugate one
another. But poetry acts in another and diviner manner. It awakens and
enlarges the mind itself by rendering it the receptacle of a thousand
unapprehended combinations of thought. Poetry lifts the veil from the
hidden beauty of the world, and makes familiar objects be as if they
were not familiar; it reproduces all that it represents, and the
impersonations clothed in its Elysian light stand thenceforward in the
minds of those who have once contemplated them, as memorials of that
gentle and exalted content which extends itself over all thoughts and
actions with which it coexists. The great secret of morals is love; or
a going out of our own nature, and an identification of ourselves with
the beautiful which exists in thought, action, or person, not our own.
A man, to be greatly good, must imagine intensely and comprehensively;
he must put himself in the place of another and of many others; the
pains and pleasures of his species must become his own. The great
instrument of moral good is the imagination; and poetry administers to
the effect by acting upon the cause. Poetry enlarges the circumference
of the imagination by replenishing it with thoughts of ever new
delight, which have the power of attracting and assimilating to their
own nature all other thoughts, and which form new intervals and
interstices whose void for ever craves fresh food. Poetry strengthens
the faculty which is the organ of the moral nature of man, in the same
manner as exercise strengthens a limb. A poet therefore would do ill
to embody his own conce