s the entire nervous system.
States of feeling, whether sensuous or spiritual, which thus possess
the whole being, are the fountains of that which we have called the
poetry of poets; and which is little else than a pouring forth of the
thoughts and images that pass across the mind while some permanent
state of feeling is occupying it.

To the same original fineness of organization, Shelley was doubtless
indebted for another of his rarest gifts, that exuberance of imagery,
which when unrepressed, as in many of his poems it is, amounts to a
fault. The susceptibility of his nervous system, which made his
emotions intense, made also the impressions of his external senses
deep and clear; and agreeably to the law of association by which, as
already remarked, the strongest impressions are those which associate
themselves the most easily and strongly, these vivid sensations were
readily recalled to mind by all objects or thoughts which had
co-existed with them, and by all feelings which in any degree
resembled them. Never did a fancy so teem with sensuous imagery as
Shelley's. Wordsworth economizes an image, and detains it until he has
distilled all the poetry out of it, and it will not yield a drop more:
Shelley lavishes his with a profusion which is unconscious because it
is inexhaustible.

If, then, the maxim _Nascitur poeta_ mean, either that the power of
producing poetical compositions is a peculiar faculty which the poet
brings into the world with him, which grows with his growth like any
of his bodily powers, and is as independent of culture as his height,
and his complexion; or that any natural peculiarity whatever is
implied in producing poetry, real poetry, and in any quantity--such
poetry too, as, to the majority of educated and intelligent readers,
shall appear quite as good as, or even better than, any other; in
either sense the doctrine is false. And nevertheless, there _is_
poetry which could not emanate but from a mental and physical
constitution peculiar, not in the kind, but in the degree of its
susceptibility: a constitution which makes its possessor capable of
greater happiness than mankind in general, and also of greater
unhappiness; and because greater, so also more various. And such
poetry, to all who know enough of nature to own it as being in nature,
is much more poetry, is poetry in a far higher sense, than any other;
since the common element of all poetry, that which constitutes poetry,
human feeli