distinguishes poetry
from the arduous processes of science, labouring towards an end not yet
arrived at, and supposes a smooth and finished road, on which the reader
is to walk onward easily, with streams murmuring by his side, and trees
and flowers and human dwellings to make his journey as delightful as the
object of it is desirable, instead of having to toil with the pioneers and
painfully make the road on which others are to travel,--precludes, on the
other hand, every affectation and morbid peculiarity;--the second
condition, sensuousness, insures that framework of objectivity, that
definiteness and articulation of imagery, and that modification of the
images themselves, without which poetry becomes flattened into mere
didactics of practice, or evaporated into a hazy, unthoughtful,
day-dreaming; and the third condition, passion, provides that neither
thought nor imagery shall be simply objective, but that the _passio vera_
of humanity shall warm and animate both.

To return, however, to the previous definition, this most general and
distinctive character of a poem originates in the poetic genius itself;
and though it comprises whatever can with any propriety be called a poem
(unless that word be a mere lazy synonym for a composition in metre), it
yet becomes a just, and not merely discriminative, but full and adequate,
definition of poetry in its highest and most peculiar sense, only so far
as the distinction still results from the poetic genius, which sustains
and modifies the emotions, thoughts, and vivid representations of the poem
by the energy without effort of the poet's own mind,--by the spontaneous
activity of his imagination and fancy, and by whatever else with these
reveals itself in the balancing and reconciling of opposite or discordant
qualities, sameness with difference, a sense of novelty and freshness with
old or customary objects, a more than usual state of emotion with more
than usual order, self-possession and judgment with enthusiasm and
vehement feeling,--and which, while it blends and harmonizes the natural
and the artificial, still subordinates art to nature, the manner to the
matter, and our admiration of the poet to our sympathy with the images,
passions, characters, and incidents of the poem:--

"Doubtless, this could not be, but that she turns
Bodies to _spirit_ by sublimation strange,
As fire converts to fire the things it burns--
As we our food into our nature change!

"From their gr