t that the winds of March be taken
with the beauty of daffodils, this was a delicate secret which those
winds would confide only to one so sympathetic as Shakespeare. This is
poetic imagination, the intellect sent on far errands by a sensibility
which is at once generous and bold, and fastidious through the
promptings and the exactions of the beautiful.

In the opening of "Il Penseroso" Milton describes the shapes that in
sprightly moods possess the fancy,

"As thick and numberless
As the gay motes that _people_ the sunbeams."

Put _shine in_ the sunbeams, for _people_, and, notwithstanding the
luminousness of the word substituted, you take the sparkle out of the
line, which sparkle is imparted by mental activity, and the poetic
dash that has the delightful audacity to personify such atomies.

The poetical is the flush on the face of things in the
unconscious triumph of their purest life, cognizable by being beheld
at the moment when the higher faculties are at their fullest flood,
buoyed up on the joy of being and emotional sympathy. The most and the
highest of this joy is possessed by him whose imagination is most
capable of being poetically agitated; for by such agitation light is
engendered within him, whereby objects and sensations that before were
dim and opaque grow luminous and pellucid, like great statuary in
twilight or moonlight, standing vague and unvalued until a torch is
waved over it.

When we begin to speak of poetry, the higher qualities of the mind
come up for judgment. No genuine poet is without one or more of these,
and a great poet must have most of them. Thence the thought of the
poet is pitched on a high key, and even in poets of power the poetry
of a page is sometimes shown merely by the sustained tone of the
sentiment, giving out no jets of fire, having no passages salient with
golden embossings. Through sympathy and sense of beauty, the poet gets
nearer to the absolute nature of things; and thence, with little of
imagery, or coloring, or passion, through this holy influence
he becomes poetic, depicting by re-creating the object or feeling or
condition, and rising naturally into rhythmic lines and sentences, the
best substance asking for, and readily obtaining, the most suitable
form of words. Yet a poet of inward resources can seldom write a page
without there being heard a note or bar or passage of the finer
melody.

But men wanting this inward wealth, that is, wantin