ts on having--

High and passionate thoughts
To their own music chanted.

Their verse alone is a charm and a joy. But their primary value to us
is that they are among the rare beings who have possessed "the vision
and the faculty divine," who, to quote Ruskin, can "startle our lethargy
with the deep and pure agitation of astonishment." There is about them
nothing incomprehensibly transcendental, nothing "unpractical," nothing
aloof from the life we live--if we live it fully--but wholly the
contrary. Those who say otherwise are but exposing their own short
sight, their own creeping imagination, their own narrowness of sympathy.

Take Shakespeare. What he possesses is not only the most stupendous
eloquence ever owned by man. It is profound knowledge of humanity,
gathered by a keen and open-eyed Olympian contemplation of all sorts and
conditions of men, from the egregious Bottom, and Dogberry the muddled,
up to Hamlet and Imogen; it is the broad myriad-minded understanding
which feels with every class, and, withal, suffers even fools gladly.
His prime value is that he saw--saw life steadily and saw it whole--saw
clearly into and round that thought, that sentiment, that passion, that
apparent contradiction, which commoner minds have only perceived as a
vague nebula. It is so that Carlyle describes the poet: "An inspired
soul, once more vouchsafed to us direct from Nature's own fire heat, to
see the truth and speak it." The sovereign poets do this with such
godlike ease that we seldom realize their vast achievement.

It is not the greatest masters who surround their expression with a
haze, even with a glory haze. It is not the greatest masters who express
things vaguely because they see them dimly. They see the thing and speak
it.

But the supreme poet not only sees thus with his intellect; he
experiences with his feelings. He possesses "the experiencing nature."
Emerson declares that "among partial men he stands for the complete man,
the representative of man, in virtue of having the largest power to
receive and impart." This is, of course, said of the best; it is not to
be said of the scribblers and the poetasters in their thousands; it is
not to be said of the innumerable warblers whose feeble songs "grate on
their scrannel pipes of wretched straw"; it is not true even of a
canorous rhetorician, such as Swinburne, or a dreamy teller of tales
like William Morris; but it is beyond question true of a Shakespeare or