objects, and slowly feeding his mind with images. The common hedge-row,
the gurgling brook, the waving corn, the shifting cloud-architecture,
and the sloping uplands, have been seen by us a thousand times, but
they show us nothing new; they have been seen by him a thousand times,
and each time with fresh interest, and fresh discovery. If he describe
that walk he will surprise us with revelations: we can then and
thereafter see all that he points out; but we needed his vision to
direct our own. And it is one of the incalculable influences of poetry
that each new revelation is an education of the eye and the feelings.
We learn to see and feel Nature in a far clearer and profounder way,
now that we have been taught to look by poets. The incurious
unimpassioned gaze of the Alpine peasant on the scenes which
mysteriously and profoundly affect the cultivated tourist, is the gaze
of one who has never been taught to look. The greater sensibility of
educated Europeans to influences which left even the poetic Greeks
unmoved, is due to the directing vision of successive poets.

The great difficulty which besets us all--Shakspeares and others, but
Shakspeares less than others---is the difficulty of disengaging the
mind from the thraldom of sensation and habit, and escaping from the
pressure of objects immediately present, or of ideas which naturally
emerge, linked together as they are by old associations. We have to see
anew, to think anew. It requires great vigour to escape from the old
and spontaneously recurrent trains of thought. And as this vigour is
native, not acquired, my readers may, perhaps, urge the futility of
expounding with so much pains a principle of success in Literature
which, however indispensable, must be useless as a guide; they may
object that although good Literature rests on insight, there is nothing
to be gained by saying "unless a man have the requisite insight he will
not succeed." But there is something to be gained. In the first place,
this is an analytical inquiry into the conditions of success: it aims
at discriminating the leading principles which inevitably determine
success. In the second place, supposing our analysis of the conditions
to be correct, practical guidance must follow. We cannot, it is true,
gain clearness of vision simply by recognising its necessity; but by
recognising its necessity we are taught to seek for it as a primary
condition of success; we are forced to come to an understandi