is
as it were the interpenetration of a diviner nature through our own;
but its footsteps are like those of a wind over the sea, which the
coming calm erases, and whose traces remain only, as on the wrinkled
sand which paves it. These and corresponding conditions of being are
experienced principally by those of the most delicate sensibility and
the most enlarged imagination; and the state of mind produced by them
is at war with every base desire. The enthusiasm of virtue, love,
patriotism, and friendship, is essentially linked with such emotions;
and whilst they last, self appears as what it is, an atom to a
universe. Poets are not only subject to these experiences as spirits
of the most refined organization, but they can colour all that they
combine with the evanescent hues of this ethereal world; a word, a
trait in the representation of a scene or a passion, will touch the
enchanted chord, and reanimate, in those who have ever experienced
these emotions, the sleeping, the cold, the buried image of the past.
Poetry thus makes immortal all that is best and most beautiful in the
world; it arrests the vanishing apparitions which haunt the
interlunations of life, and veiling them, or in language or in form,
sends them forth among mankind, bearing sweet news of kindred joy to
those with whom their sisters abide--abide, because there is no portal
of expression from the caverns of the spirit which they inhabit into
the universe of things. Poetry redeems from decay the visitations of
the divinity in man.

Poetry turns all things to loveliness; it exalts the beauty of that
which is most beautiful, and it adds beauty to that which is most
deformed; it marries exultation and horror, grief and pleasure,
eternity and change; it subdues to union under its light yoke all
irreconcilable things. It transmutes all that it touches, and every
form moving within the radiance of its presence is changed by wondrous
sympathy to an incarnation of the spirit which it breathes: its secret
alchemy turns to potable gold the poisonous waters which flow from
death through life; it strips the veil of familiarity from the world,
and lays bare the naked and sleeping beauty, which is the spirit of
its forms.

All things exist as they are perceived; at least in relation to the
percipient. 'The mind is its own place, and of itself can make a
heaven of hell, a hell of heaven.' But poetry defeats the curse which
binds us to be subjected to the accident o