ements of beauty, of
power, and of passion in his own breast, sympathises with whatever is
beautiful, and grand, and impassioned in nature, in its simple
majesty, in its immediate appeal to the senses, to the thoughts and
hearts of all men; so that the poet of nature, by the truth, and
depth, and harmony of his mind, may be said to hold communion with
the very soul of nature; to be identified with, and to foreknow, and
to record, the feelings of all men, at all times and places, as they
are liable to the same impressions; and to exert the same power over
the minds of his readers that nature does. He sees things in their
eternal beauty, for he sees them as they are; he feels them in their
universal interest, for he feels them as they affect the first
principles of his and our common nature. Such was Homer, such was
Shakespeare, whose works will last as long as nature, because they
are a copy of the indestructible forms and everlasting impulses of
feature, welling out from the bosom as from a perennial spring, or
stamped upon the senses by the hand of their Maker. The power of the
imagination in them is the representative power of all nature. It
has its centre in the human soul, and makes the circuit of the
universe."

And this:--

"The child is a poet, in fact, when he first plays at hide-and-seek,
or repeats the story of Jack the Giant-killer; the shepherd boy is a
poet when he first crowns his mistress with a garland of flowers; the
countryman when he stops to look at the rainbow; the city apprentice
when he gazes after the Lord Mayor's show; the miser when he hugs his
gold; the courtier who builds his hopes upon a smile; the savage who
paints his idol with blood; the slave who worships a tyrant, or the
tyrant who fancies himself a god; the vain, the ambitious, the proud,
the choleric man, the hero and the coward, the beggar and the king,
the rich and the poor, the young and the old, all live in a world of
their own making; and the poet does no more than describe what all
the others think and act."

"Poetry is not a branch of authorship; it is the stuff of which our
life is made."

The artist is speaking in Hazlitt, but beneath the full, rich exuberance
of the artist, you can detect an under-note of austerity.

Then again, his memorable utterance about the Dissenting minister from