tic with the thought that it caresses and hugs it.

Depth and breadth of nature are implied in the full poetic
imagination. The love of the beautiful, wielding a keen intellect,
needs furthermore rich material to mold, and only out of the poet's
individual resources can this be drawn. To make a high artist, you
must have very much of a man. Behind "Paradise Lost" and "Samson
Agonistes" is a big Miltonic man. The poet has to put a great deal of
himself, and the best of him, into his work; thence, for high poetry,
there must be a great deal of high self to put in. He must coin his
soul, and have a large soul to coin; the best work cannot be made out
of materials gathered by memory and fancy. His stream of thought must
flow from springs, not from reservoirs. Hence the universal
biographical interest in such men; they have necessarily a rich
personality.

The passages I have cited are all pictures of outward nature, natural
scenes mirrored on the mind, or rather refracted through it, and in
the act transfigured, spiritualized; for such scenes, having
the fortune to fall on the minds of poets, are reproduced with joyful
revelation of their inmost being, as sunbeams are through a crystal
prism. Exhibiting material nature spiritualized, well do these
passages show the uplifting character of poetic imagination. But this
displays a higher, and its highest power when, striking like a
thunderbolt into the core of things, it lays bare mysteries of God and
of the heart which mere prosaic reason cannot solve or approach,
cannot indeed alone even dimly apprehend.

I will now quote passages, brief ones, wherein through the poet are
opened vast vistas into the shining universe, or is concentrated in
single or few lines the life of man's finer nature, as in the diamond
are condensed the warmth and splendor that lie latent in acres of
fossil carbon.

When, in the sixth book of "Paradise Lost," Milton narrates the
arrival on the battle-field of the Son,--

"Attended by ten thousand thousand saints,"

and then adds:--

"Far off his coming shone,"

in these five short words is a sudden glare of grandeur that dilates
the capable mind with light, and, as the sublime always does, with
awe.

When Ferdinand, in "The Tempest," leaps "with hair up-staring"
into the sea, crying,--

"Hell is empty,
And all the devils are here,"

the mind is suddenly filled with an image of the tumult and flaming
rage of a thunder-