s features with a celestial
subtilizing aura. How has this been accomplished? The first line has
little of the quality of poetic imagination.

"A fairer face of evening cannot be."

is simple and appropriate, but in it there is no fresh glow, no
mysterious throb. Above the level of this line rise suddenly the first
three words of the second, "the holy time." The presence of a scene
where sky, earth, and ocean combine for the delight of the beholders
puts them in a mood which crowns the landscape with a religious halo.
That the time is holy they all feel; and now, to make its tranquillity
appreciable by filling the heart with it, the poet adds--"is quiet as
a nun breathless with adoration." By this master-stroke of poetic
power the atmospheric earthly calm is vivified with, is changed into,
super-earthly calm. By a fresh burst of spiritual light the mind is
set aesthetically aglow, as by the beams of the setting sun the
landscape is physically. By an exceptionally empowered hand the soul
is strung to a high key. Fullness and range of sensibility open to the
poet[4] a wide field of illustration; its exacting fineness reveals
the one that carries his thought into the depths of the
reader's mind, bringing him that exquisite joy caused by keen
intellectual power in the service of pure emotion.

[4] Wordsworth.

Take now other samples from the treasury of choicest poetry. Here is
one from Coleridge:--

"And winter, slumbering in the open air,
Wears on his smiling face a dream of spring."

Here again the intellect is urged to its highest action, the abstract
or imaginative action, to do the hests of a sensibility so finely
wrought by the inward impulsion to seek for the most exquisite that
nature can furnish, that it yields similitudes most delicate, most
apt, most expressive.

Milton thus opens the fifth book of "Paradise Lost:"--

"Now morn, her rosy steps in the eastern clime
Advancing, sowed the earth with orient pearl."

Shakespeare makes Romeo describe daybreak:--

"And jocund day
Stands tiptoe on the misty mountain-tops."

Keats begins "Hyperion" with these lines:

"Deep in the shady sadness of a vale,
Far sunken from the healthy breath of morn."

In the Monody on Keats, Shelley, describing the lamentation of
nature at his death, concludes a stanza as follows:--

"Morning sought
Her eastern watch-tower, and, her hair unbound,