ltitude? After a certain time, we must either select one image or
object, which must put out of view the rest wholly, or must subordinate
them to itself while it stands forth as a head:

How glowed the firmament
With living sapphires! Hesperus, that _led_
The starry host, rode brightest; till the moon,
Rising in clouded majesty, at length,
Apparent _Queen_, unveiled _her peerless_ light,
And o'er the dark her silver mantle threw.

Having laid this down as a general principle, take the case before us. I
am represented in the sonnet as casting my eyes over the sea, sprinkled
with a multitude of ships, like the heavens with stars. My mind may be
supposed to float up and down among them, in a kind of dreamy
indifference with respect either to this or that one, only in a
pleasurable state of feeling with respect to the whole prospect.
'Joyously it showed.' This continued till that feeling may be supposed
to have passed away, and a kind of comparative listlessness or apathy to
have succeeded, as at this line,

Some veering up and down, one knew not why.

All at once, while I am in this state, comes forth an object, an
individual; and my mind, sleepy and unfixed, is awakened and fastened in
a moment.

Hesperus, that _led_
The starry host,

is a poetical object, because the glory of his own nature gives him the
pre-eminence the moment he appears. He calls forth the poetic faculty,
receiving its exertions as a tribute. But this ship in the sonnet may,
in a manner still more appropriate, be said to come upon a mission of
the poetic spirit, because, in its own appearance and attributes, it is
barely sufficiently distinguished to rouse the creative faculty of the
human mind, to exertions at all times welcome, but doubly so when they
come upon us when in a state of remissness. The mind being once fixed
and roused, all the rest comes from itself; it is merely a lordly ship,
nothing more:

This ship was nought to me, nor I to her,
Yet I pursued her with a lover's look.

My mind wantons with grateful joy in the exercise of its own powers,
and, loving its own creation,

This ship to all the rest I did prefer,

making her a sovereign or a regent, and thus giving body and life to all
the rest; mingling up this idea with fondness and praise--

where she comes the winds must stir;

and concluding the whole with,

On went she, and due north her journey