neral principles drawn from the contemplation
of particular facts, but what has been built up by pleasure, and
exists in us by pleasure alone. The man of science, the chemist, and
mathematician, whatever difficulties and disgusts they may have had to
struggle with, know and feel this. However painful may be the objects
with which the anatomist's knowledge is connected, he feels that his
knowledge is pleasure; and where he has no pleasure he has no
knowledge. What then does the poet? He considers man and the objects
that surround him as acting and reacting upon each other, so as to
produce an infinite complexity of pain and pleasure; he considers man
in his own nature and in his ordinary life as contemplating this with
a certain quantity of immediate knowledge, with certain convictions,
intuitions, and deductions, which by habit become of the nature of
intuitions; he considers him as looking upon this complex scene of
ideas and sensations, and finding everywhere objects that immediately
excite in him sympathies which, from the necessities of his nature,
are accompanied by an overbalance of enjoyment.

To this knowledge which all men carry about with them, and to these
sympathies in which, without any other discipline than that of our
daily life, we are fitted to take delight, the poet principally
directs his attention. He considers man and nature as essentially
adapted to each other, and the mind of man as naturally the mirror of
the fairest and most interesting qualities of nature. And thus the
poet, prompted by this feeling of pleasure which accompanies him
through the whole course of his studies, converses with general nature
with affections akin to those which, through labor and length of time,
the man of science has raised up in himself, by conversing with those
parts of nature which are the objects of his studies. The knowledge
both of the poet and the man of science is pleasure; but the knowledge
of the one cleaves to us as a necessary part of our existence, our
natural and unalienable inheritance; the other is a personal and
individual acquisition, slow to come to us, and by no habitual and
direct sympathy connecting us with our fellow beings. The man of
science seeks truth as a remote and unknown benefactor; he cherishes
and loves it in his solitude; the poet, singing a song in which all
human beings join with him, rejoices in the presence of truth as our
visible friend and hourly companion. Poetry is the breath