es of thought
To show her full-leaved flower.
[Footnote: _Invita Minerva_.]

Edwin Markham says,

She comes like the hush and beauty of the night.
[Footnote: _Poetry_.]

And Richard Watson Gilder's mood is the same:

How to the singer comes his song?
How to the summer fields
Come flowers? How yields
Darkness to happy dawn? How doth the night
Bring stars?
[Footnote: _How to the Singer Comes His Song?_]

Various as are these accounts which poets give of their inspired
moments, all have one point in common, since they indicate that in such
moments the poet is wholly passive. His thought is literally given to
him. Edward Dowden, in a sonnet, _Wise Passiveness_, says this
plainly:

Think you I choose or that or this to sing?
I lie as patient as yon wealthy stream
Dreaming among green fields its summer dream,
Which takes whate'er the gracious hours will bring
Into its quiet bosom.

To the same effect is a somewhat prosaic poem, _Accident in Art_,
by Richard Hovey. He inquires,

What poet has not found his spirit kneeling
A sudden at the sound of such or such
Strange verses staring from his manuscript,
Written, he knows not how, but which will sound
Like trumpets down the years.

Doubtless it is a very natural result of his resignation to this
creative force that one of the poet's profoundest sensations during his
afflatus should be that of reverence for his gift. Longfellow and
Wordsworth sometimes speak as if the composition of their poems were a
ceremony comparable to high mass. At times one must admit that verse
describing such an attitude has a charm of its own. [Footnote: Compare
Browning's characterization of the afflatus of Eglamor in _Sordello_,
Book II.] In _The Song-Tree_ Alfred Noyes describes his first sensation
as a conscious poet:

The first note that I heard,
A magical undertone,
Was sweeter than any bird
--Or so it seemed to me--
And my tears ran wild.
This tale, this tale is true.
The light was growing gray,
And the rhymes ran so sweet
(For I was only a child)
That I knelt down to pray.

But our sympathy with this little poet would not be nearly so intense
were he twenty years older. When it is said of a mature poetess,

She almost shrank
To feel the secret and expanding might
Of her own mind,
[Footnote: _The Last Hours of a Young Poetess_, Lucy Hooper.]

the reader does not always remain in a sympathetically prayerful