, less
capable of perceiving and teaching the truth of things, than those who
have omitted that form. Shakespeare, Dante, and Milton (to confine
ourselves to modern writers) are philosophers of the very loftiest
power.

[11] See the _Filum Labyrinthi_, and the Essay on Death
particularly.

A poem is the very image of life expressed in its eternal truth. There
is this difference between a story and a poem, that a story is a
catalogue of detached facts, which have no other connexion than time,
place, circumstance, cause and effect; the other is the creation of
actions according to the unchangeable forms of human nature, as
existing in the mind of the Creator, which is itself the image of all
other minds. The one is partial, and applies only to a definite period
of time, and a certain combination of events which can never again
recur; the other is universal, and contains within itself the germ of
a relation to whatever motives or actions have place in the possible
varieties of human nature. Time, which destroys the beauty and the use
of the story of particular facts, stripped of the poetry which should
invest them, augments that of poetry, and for ever develops new and
wonderful applications of the eternal truth which it contains. Hence
epitomes have been called the moths of just history; they eat out the
poetry of it. A story of particular facts is as a mirror which
obscures and distorts that which should be beautiful: poetry is a
mirror which makes beautiful that which is distorted.

The parts of a composition may be poetical, without the composition as
a whole being a poem. A single sentence may be considered as a whole,
though it may be found in the midst of a series of unassimilated
portions: a single word even may be a spark of inextinguishable
thought. And thus all the great historians, Herodotus, Plutarch, Livy,
were poets; and although the plan of these writers, especially that of
Livy, restrained them from developing this faculty in its highest
degree, they made copious and ample amends for their subjection, by
filling all the interstices of their subjects with living images.

Having determined what is poetry, and who are poets, let us proceed to
estimate its effects upon society.

Poetry is ever accompanied with pleasure: all spirits on which it
falls open themselves to receive the wisdom which is mingled with its
delight. In the infancy of the world, neither poets themselves nor
their auditors ar