ial thoughts
or occupations from the indulgence of them, and if he acquire by
culture, as all persons may, the faculty of delineating them
correctly,--has it in his power to be a poet, so far as a life passed
in writing unquestionable poetry may be considered to confer that
title. But _ought_ it to do so? Yes, perhaps, in a collection of
'British Poets'. But 'poet' is the name also of a variety of man, not
solely of the author of a particular variety of book: now, to have
written whole volumes of real poetry is possible to almost all kinds
of characters, and implies no greater peculiarity of mental
construction, than to be the author of a history, or a novel.

Whom, then, shall we call poets? Those who are so constituted, that
emotions are the links of association by which their ideas, both
sensuous and spiritual, are connected together. This constitution
belongs (within certain limits) to all in whom poetry is a pervading
principle. In all others, poetry is something extraneous and
superinduced: something out of themselves, foreign to the habitual
course of their every-day lives and characters; a world to which they
may make occasional visits, but where they are sojourners, not
dwellers, and which, when out of it, or even when in it, they think
of, peradventure, but as a phantom-world, a place of _ignes fatui_ and
spectral illusions. Those only who have the peculiarity of association
which we have mentioned, and which is a natural though not a universal
consequence of intense sensibility, instead of seeming not themselves
when they are uttering poetry, scarcely seem themselves when uttering
anything to which poetry is foreign. Whatever be the thing which they
are contemplating, if it be capable of connecting itself with their
emotions, the aspect under which it first and most naturally paints
itself to them, is its poetic aspect. The poet of culture sees his
object in prose, and describes it in poetry; the poet of nature
actually sees it in poetry.

This point is perhaps worth some little illustration; the rather, as
metaphysicians (the ultimate arbiters of all philosophical criticism),
while they have busied themselves for two thousand years, more or
less, about the few _universal_ laws of human nature, have strangely
neglected the analysis of its _diversities_. Of these, none lie deeper
or reach further than the varieties which difference of nature and of
education makes in what may be termed the habitual bond of