storm at sea, such as words have never elsewhere
carried. What a reach in the imaginative stroke! In the first scene of
"Faust," the earth-spirit, whom Faust has evoked, concludes the
whirling, dazzling, brief, but gigantic sketch of his function with
these words, the majesty of which translation cannot entirely
subdue:--

"I ply the resounding great loom of old Time,
And work at the Godhead's live vesture sublime."

How ennobling is the idea the mind harbors of humanity, after taking
in these lines from Wordsworth's "Ode on Intimations of
Immortality:"--

"But trailing clouds of glory do we come
From God, who is our home."

With a single epithet, coined for the occasion, Keats flashes upon our
imagination the dethroned Saturn and the immensity of his fall:

"Upon the sodden ground
His old right hand lay nerveless, listless, dead,
Unsceptered; and his _realmless_ eyes were closed."

The "Hyperion" of this transcendent genius, written in his
twenty-fourth year, the year before he died, is as great poetry as has
ever been treasured in words. In it he lavishes poetic wealth as
though gold were with him as plenty as silver; and so on the next page
he exceeds, if possible, the sublimity of the above lines, making Thea
write in the catalogue of Saturn's colossal deprivations,--

"And all the air
Is emptied of thine hoary majesty."

These passages vividly exemplify poetic imagination, which is the
illumining of a capable material by a spiritual light, a light thrown
into it from the glow kindled in the poet's mind with richest
sensibilities, that are refined and sublimated by an exacting, subtle
inward demand for the best they can render. A single flash of new
thrilling light irradiates a continent of thought. This is the work of
genius, and genius is ever marked by a deeper sympathy with and
recognition of the creative spirit and the divine action, a sympathy
and recognition so sensitive that the spirit and action of the writer
are permeated by the divine effluence, he becoming thereby the
interpreter of divine law, the exhibitor of divine beauty.

In these passages the thought of the poet is thrust up through
the overlaying crust of the common, by a warming, expanding, inward
motion, which is sped by a vitality so urgent and irresistible that,
to make passage for the new thought, lightly is lifted a load which,
but for this spiritual efficacy, could not be stirre