d, just as heavy
stones are raised by delicate growing plants. To exert this power the
poet is always moved at the instance of feeling. Poetry having its
birth in feeling, no man can enjoy or value it but through feeling.
But what moves him to embody and shape his feeling is that ravishing
sentiment which will have the best there is in the feeling, the
sentiment which seeks satisfaction through contemplation or
entertainment of the most divine and most perfect, and ever rises to
the top of the refined joy which such contemplation educes.

The poetic imagination is the Ariel of the poet,--his spiritual
messenger and Mercury. A clear look into the above passages would show
that the source of their power is in the farther scope or exquisite
range the imagination opens to us, often by a word. For further
illustration I will take a few other examples, scrutinizing them more
minutely. Had Lorenzo opened the famous passage in "The
Merchant of Venice" thus,--

"How _calm_ the moonlight _lies_ upon this bank,"

and continued to the end of the dozen lines in the same key, saying,--

"There's not the _tiniest star_ that _can be seen_
But in its _revolution_ it doth _hum_,
Aye _chanting_ to the _heavenly_ cherubins,"

his words would not have become celebrated and quotable. But Lorenzo
has the privilege of being one of the mouth-pieces of Shakespeare, and
so he begins,--

"How _sweet_ the moonlight _sleeps_ upon this bank."

Two words, _sweet_ and _sleep_, put in the place of _calm_ and _lies_,
lift the line out of prose into poetry. A log _lies_ on a bank; so
does a dead dog, and the more dead a thing is the more it lies; but
only what is alive _sleeps_, and thus the word, besides an image of
extreme stillness, brings with it what strengthens the image, the idea
of change from liveliness to quiet; for that which was awake now
sleeps; and the more full the picture of stillness, the more awake is
the mind of the reader, awakened by the fitness and felicity of the
image. The substitution of _sweet_ for _calm_ is, in a less degree,
similarly enlivening; for, used in such conjunction, _sweet_ is more
individual and subtle, and imports more life, and thus helps the
distinctness and vividness of the picture. How does the poetic Lorenzo
word the other three lines?

"There's not the _smallest orb_ which _thou behold'st_,
But in _his motion like an angel sings_,
Still _quiring_ to the _young-eyed_ cherubins."

T