ng tears, throes, choked with wild cries;
O storm, embodied, rising, careering with swift steps along the
beach!
O wild and dismal night storm, with wind--O belching and
desperate!
O shade so sedate and decorous by day, with calm countenance
and regulated pace,
But away at night as you fly, none looking--O then the
unloosened ocean
Of tears! tears! tears!"

Now I know. My mood was the mood of tears. The poet, too, has
felt what I was feeling. And as a poet he has been able to bring his
emotion to expression. By the magic of phrase and the mystery of
image he has, out of the moving of his spirit, fashioned a concrete
reality. By means of his expression, because of it, his emotion
becomes realized, and so reaches its fulfillment. And for me, what
before was vague has been made definite. The poet's lines have
wakened in me a response; I have felt what he has phrased; and now
they become my expression too. As my mood takes form, I become
conscious of its meaning. I can distill its significance for the spirit,
and in the emotion made definite and realizable as consciousness I
feel and know that I am living. Doubly, completely, the poem is a
work of art. And my response to it, the absorption of it into my own
experience, is appreciation.

I appreciate the poem as I make the experience which the poet has
here phrased my own, and at the instant of reading I live out in
myself what he has lived and here expressed. I read the words, and
intellectually I take in their signification, but the poem is not
realized in me until it wakens in me the feeling which the words are
framed to convey. The images which an artist employs have the
power to rouse emotion in us, so that they come to stand for the
emotion itself. We care for nature and it is beautiful to us as its
forms become objectively the intimate expression for us of what we
feel.

"O to realize space!
The plenteousness of all, that there are no bounds,
To emerge and be of the sky, of the sun and moon and flying
clouds, as one with them."

In his contact with the external world the artist identifies himself
with his object. If he is painting a tree he in a measure becomes the
tree; he values it at all because it expresses for him concretely what
he feels in its presence. The object and his spirit fuse; and through
the fusion they together grow into a new and larger unity. What his