to admire and to love.
It is by interweaving human sympathies and feelings with the objects of
the material world, that they lose their character of 'mute insensate
things,' and acquire the power to charm and to soothe us, amidst all the
cares and anxieties of our life. The intellectual process which here takes
place is so interesting and important that we shall make no apology for
treating the subject at some length.

It is sufficiently obvious that an accurate description of nature, or a
beautiful work of art, is not poetical. On the other hand, in proportion
as the minuteness of the description is increased, the poetry vanishes.
The traveller who should give us the exact dimensions of the pyramids, the
precise height of the terraces, the width and height of the inner
passages, would give us much more definite ideas of those structures than
he who should paint to us the effects produced on his own mind by their
vastness, their antiquity, and the solitude that surrounds them. So in
descriptions of natural scenery, the geographer who gives us the
measurement of mountains, and rivers, and plains, is much more accurate
than he who describes them solely from the picture that exists in his
fancy. We wish to be rightly understood. We do not mean that vagueness and
generality are essential to poetical description. As on the one hand,
mathematical accuracy, by allowing no play to the imagination, produces a
feeble impression, so on the other the indistinctness arising from
indefinite expressions is equally unfavorable. But in neither is the
poetry of the description dependent on the greater or less degree of
minuteness with which particular objects are spoken of. When Whitbread
described the Phenix, according to Sheridan's version, 'like a poulterer;
it was green, and red, and yellow, and blue; he did not let us off for a
single feather,' he did not fail more egregiously than Thomson in the
following lines, in which, by the force of language, a flock of geese are
made highly poetical objects:

'Hushed in short suspense
The plumy people streak their wings with oil,
To throw the lucid moisture trickling off,
And wait the approaching sign to strike at once
Into the general choir.'

The poet indeed must give us a lively and definite image of the scene or
object which he undertakes to describe. But how shall this be done? Simply
by telling us how it appeared to him; introducing those circumstances
which