n Dante, it is Hell;
in Milton, Satan and the Fall; in Shakespeare, it is the fierce Feudal
world, with its towering and kingly personalities; in Byron, it is
Revolt and diabolic passion. When we get to Tennyson, the lion is a good
deal tamed, but he is still there in the shape of the proud, haughty,
and manly Norman, and in many forms yet stimulates the mind.

The perception of cosmical beauty comes by a vital original process.
It is in some measure a creative act, and those works that rest upon
it make demands--perhaps extraordinary ones--upon the reader or the
beholder. We regard mere surface glitter, or mere verbal sweetness, in
a mood entirely passive, and with a pleasure entirely profitless. The
beauty of excellent stage scenery seems much more obvious and easy of
apprehension than the beauty of trees and hills themselves, inasmuch as
the act of association in the mind is much easier and cheaper than the
act of original perception.

Only the greatest works in any department afford any explanation of this
wonder we call nature, or aid the mind in arriving at correct
notions concerning it. To copy here and there a line or a trait is no
explanation; but to translate nature into another language--to bridge
it to us, to repeat in some sort the act of creation itself--is the
crowning triumph of poetic art.

II

After the critic has enumerated all the stock qualities of the poet,
as taste, fancy, melody, it remains to be said that unless there is
something in him that is _living identity,_ something analogous to the
growing, pushing, reproducing forces of nature, all the rest in the end
pass for but little.

This is perhaps what the German critic, Lessing, really means by
_action,_ for true poems are more like deeds, expressive of something
behind, more like acts of heroism or devotion, or like personal
character, than like thoughts or intellections.

All the master poets have in their work an interior, chemical,
assimilative property, a sort of gastric juice which dissolves thought
and form, and holds in vital fusion religions, times, races, and the
theory of their own construction, naming up with electric and defiant
power,--power without any admixture of resisting form, as in a living
organism.

There are in nature two types or forms, the cell and the crystal.
One means the organic, the other the inorganic; one means growth,
development, life; the other means reaction, solidification, rest. The
hint and