n each of us,
which the circumstances of life determine to a narrow channel; and
we like to revenge ourselves in our reveries for this imputed
limitation, by classifying ourselves with all that we are not, but
might so easily have been. We are full of sympathy for every
manifestation of life, however unusual; and even the conception of
infinite knowledge and happiness -- than which nothing could be
more removed from our condition or more unrealizable to our
fancy -- remains eternally interesting to us.

The poet, therefore, who wishes to delineate a character need not
keep a note-book. There is a quicker road to the heart -- if he has
the gift to find it. Probably his readers will not themselves have
kept note-books, and his elaborate observations will only be
effective when he describes something which they also happen to
have noticed. The typical characters describable by the empirical
method are therefore few: the miser, the lover, the old nurse, the
ingenue, and the other types of traditional comedy. Any greater
specification would appeal only to a small audience for a short
time, because the characteristics depicted would no longer exist to
be recognized. But whatever experience a poet's hearers may have
had, they are men. They will have certain imaginative capacities to
conceive and admire those forms of character and action which,
although never actually found, are felt by each man to express
what he himself might and would have been, had circumstances
been more favourable.

The poet has only to study himself, and the art of expressing his
own ideals, to find that he has expressed those of other people. He
has but to enact in himself the part of each of his personages, and if
he possesses that pliability and that definiteness of imagination
which together make genius, he may express for his fellows those
inward tendencies which in them have remained painfully dumb.
He will be hailed as master of the human soul. He may know
nothing of men, he may have almost no experience; but his
creations will pass for models of naturalness, and for types of
humanity. Their names will be in every one's mouth, and the lives
of many generations will be enriched by the vision, one might
almost say by the friendship, of these imaginary beings. They have
individuality without having reality, because individuality is a
thing acquired in the mind by the congeries of its impressions.
They have power, also, because that depends on th