sending forth clear
flame unmixed with smoke. To perceive this light, and, still
more, to have your path illuminated thereby, implies the present
activity of some of the higher human sensibilities; and to be so
organized as to be able to embody in words, after having imagined,
personages, conditions, and conjunctions whence this light shall flash
on and ignite the sensibilities of others, implies, besides vivid
sympathies and delight in the beautiful, a susceptibility to the
manifestations of moral and intellectual life which is enjoyed only by
him in whom the nobler elements of being are present in such
intensity, proportions, and quality, and are so commingled, that he
can reproduce life itself with translucent truthfulness, he becoming,
through this exalting susceptibility, poet or maker.

What constitutes the wealth of human life? Is it not fullness and
richness of feeling? To refine this fullness, to purify this richness,
to distill the essence out of this wealth, to educate the feelings by
revealing their subtle possibilities, by bringing to light the
divinity there is within and behind them, this is the poet's part; and
this, his great part, he can only do by being blest with more than
common sympathy with the spirit of the Almighty Creator, and thence
clearer insight into his work and will. Merely to embody in
verse the feelings, thoughts, deeds, scenes of human life, is not the
poet's office; but to exhibit these as having attained, or as capable
of attaining, the power and beauty and spirituality possible to each.
The glorifier of humanity the poet is, not its mere reporter; that is
the historian's function. The poet's business is not with facts as
such, or with inferences, but with truth of feeling, and the very
spirit of truth. His function is ideal; that is, from the prosaic, the
individual, the limited, he is to lift us up to the universal, the
generic, the boundless. In compassing this noble end he may, if such
be his bent, use the facts and feelings and individualities of daily
life; and, by illuminating and ennobling them he will approve his
human insight, as well as his poetic gift.

The generic in sentiment, the universal, the infinite, can only be
reached and recognized through the higher feelings, through those
whose activity causes emotion. The simple impulses, the elementary
loves, are in themselves bounded in their action near and direct; but
growing round the very fountain of life, having thei