Wet with the tears that should adorn the ground,
Dimmed the aerial eyes that kindle day;
Afar the melancholy thunder moaned,
Pale Ocean in unquiet slumber lay,
And the wild winds flew around, sobbing in their dismay."

Such passages are the very flower of poetry, thought exquisitely dyed
in sentiment, laying suddenly bare a picture with so much light in it
that each passage irradiates its page and the reader's mind. By their
happiness the similitudes emphasize and enforce the thought; and they
do a higher service than this; for, being a breath from the inner life
of genius, they blow power into the reader. To translate these
passages into prose were like trying to translate a lily into the mold
out of which it springs, or a bar of Beethoven into the sounds of the
forum, or the sparkle of stars into the warmth of a coal fire.

The best poetry has a far background; it comes out of deeps within the
poet, unfathomed by himself, unfathomable. He feels more than he can
express. Hence the imaginative poet always suggests, revealing enough
to inspirit the reader's higher faculties to strive for more;
not because, with artistic design, he leaves much untold, which he
often does, but because through imaginative susceptibility he at times
grasps at and partly apprehends much that cannot be embodied. He feels
his subject more largely and deeply than he can see or represent it.
To you his work is suggestive because to him the subject suggested
more than he could give utterance to. Every subject, especially every
subject of poetic capability, having infinite relations, he who most
apprehends this boundlessness--and indeed because he does apprehend
it--can do or say what will open it to you or me; and the degree of
his genius is measured by the extent to which he can present or expose
it. The unimaginative gives surface-work, and, suggesting nothing, is
at once exhausted.

The poetic imagination shows itself in the epithets the poet has at
his command, creative insight drawing an epithet out of the heart of
an object; whence, there is beneath such an epithet a depth that keeps
feeding it with significance, bringing out its aptness the longer we
look. Sometimes epithets are brighter than their object; the
unimaginative thus futilely striving to impart power instead of
deriving it. To be lasting, the light of the epithet must be struck by
the imagination out of its object. The inspired poet finds a word so
sympathe