creative agency will the poet
distinguish the degree and kind of the excitement produced by the very
act of poetic composition. As intuitively will he know, what
differences of style it at once inspires and justifies; what
intermixture of conscious volition is natural to that state; and in
what instances such figures and colours of speech degenerate into mere
creatures of an arbitrary purpose, cold technical artifices of
ornament or connexion. For, even as truth is its own light and
evidence, discovering at once itself and falsehood, so is it the
prerogative of poetic genius to distinguish by parental instinct its
proper offspring from the changelings, which the gnomes of vanity or
the fairies of fashion may have laid in its cradle or called by its
names. Could a rule be given from without, poetry would cease to be
poetry, and sink into a mechanical art. It would be [Greek:
morphosis], not [Greek: poiesis]. The rules of the IMAGINATION are
themselves the very powers of growth and production. The words to
which they are reducible, present only the outlines and external
appearance of the fruit. A deceptive counterfeit of the superficial
form and colours may be elaborated; but the marble peach feels cold
and heavy, and children only put it to their mouths. We find no
difficulty in admitting as excellent, and the legitimate language of
poetic fervour self-impassioned, Donne's apostrophe to the Sun in the
second stanza of his _Progress of the Soul_.

Thee, eye of heaven! this great soul envies not;
By thy male force is all, we have, begot.
In the first East thou now beginn'st to shine,
Suck'st early balm and island spices there,
And wilt anon in thy loose-rein'd career
At Tagus, Po, Seine, Thames, and Danow dine,
And see at night this western world of mine:
Yet hast thou not more nations seen than she,
Who before thee one day began to be,
And, thy frail light being quench'd, shall long, long outlive thee!

Or the next stanza but one:

Great destiny, the commissary of God,
That hast mark'd out a path and period
For ev'ry thing! Who, where we offspring took,
Our way and ends see'st at one instant: thou
Knot of all causes! Thou, whose changeless brow
Ne'er smiles nor frowns! O! vouchsafe thou to look,
And show my story in thy eternal book, &c.

As little difficulty do we find in excluding from the honours of
unaffected warmth and elevation the madness