he common day!

Then some poets there are, who show you a scene all of a sudden, by
means of a few magical words--just as if you opened your eyes at their
bidding--and in place of a blank, a world. Others, again, as good and as
great, create their world gradually before your eyes, for the delight of
your soul, that loves to gaze on the growing glory; but delight is lost
in wonder, and you know that they, too, are warlocks. Some heap image
upon image, piles of imagery on piles of imagery, as if they were
ransacking and robbing, and red-reavering earth, sea, and sky; yet all
things there are consentaneous with one grand design, which, when
consummated, is a Whole that seems to typify the universe. Others give
you but fragments--but such as awaken imaginations of beauty and of
power transcendent, like that famous Torso. And some show you Nature
glimmering beneath a veil which, nunlike, she has religiously taken; and
then call not Nature ideal only in that holy twilight, for then it is
that she is spiritual, and we who belong to her feel that we shall live
for ever.

Thus--and in other wondrous ways--the great poets are the great
painters, and so are they the great musicians. But how they are so, some
other time may we tell; suffice it now to say, that as we listen to the
mighty masters--"sole or responsive to each other's voice"--

"Now, 'tis like all instruments,
Now like a lonely lute;
And now 'tis like an angel's song
That bids the heavens be mute!"

Why will so many myriads of men and women, denied by nature "the vision
and the faculty divine," persist in the delusion that they are
poetising, while they are but versifying "this bright and breathing
world?" They see truly not even the outward objects of sight. But of all
the rare affinities and relationships in Nature, visible or audible to
Fine-ear-and-Far-eye the Poet, not a whisper--not a glimpse have they
ever heard or seen, any more than had they been born deaf-blind.

They paint a landscape, but nothing "prates of their whereabouts," while
they were sitting on a tripod, with their paper on their knees,
drawing--their breath. For, in the front ground is a castle, against
which, if you offer to stir a step, you infallibly break your head,
unless providentially stopped by that extraordinary vegetable-looking
substance, perhaps a tree, growing bolt upright out of an intermediate
stone, that has wedged itself in long after there had ceased to be e