song,
subordinating how many admirably executed parts. Why should not the
symmetry and truth that modulate these, glide into our spirits, and we
participate the invention of nature?

This insight, which expresses itself by what is called Imagination, is
a very high sort of seeing, which does not come by study, but by the
intellect being where and what it sees; by sharing the path or circuit
of things through forms, and so making them translucid to others. The
path of things is silent. Will they suffer a speaker to go with them? A
spy they will not suffer; a lover, a poet, is the transcendency of their
own nature,--him they will suffer. The condition of true naming, on the
poet's part, is his resigning himself to the divine aura which breathes
through forms, and accompanying that.

It is a secret which every intellectual man quickly learns, that, beyond
the energy of his possessed and conscious intellect he is capable of a
new energy (as of an intellect doubled on itself), by abandonment to the
nature of things; that beside his privacy of power as an individual man,
there is a great public power on which he can draw, by unlocking, at
all risks, his human doors, and suffering the ethereal tides to roll
and circulate through him; then he is caught up into the life of the
Universe, his speech is thunder, his thought is law, and his words are
universally intelligible as the plants and animals. The poet knows that
he speaks adequately then only when he speaks somewhat wildly, or, "with
the flower of the mind;" not with the intellect used as an organ, but
with the intellect released from all service and suffered to take its
direction from its celestial life; or as the ancients were wont to
express themselves, not with intellect alone but with the intellect
inebriated by nectar. As the traveller who has lost his way throws his
reins on his horse's neck and trusts to the instinct of the animal
to find his road, so must we do with the divine animal who carries us
through this world. For if in any manner we can stimulate this instinct,
new passages are opened for us into nature; the mind flows into and
through things hardest and highest, and the metamorphosis is possible.

This is the reason why bards love wine, mead, narcotics, coffee, tea,
opium, the fumes of sandal-wood and tobacco, or whatever other procurers
of animal exhilaration. All men avail themselves of such means as they
can, to add this extraordinary power to their