seems in words of human language than in the pictured hieroglyph and
symphonic movement of natural things; for in such poetry it is not the
vision of nature, however beautiful, that holds attention; it is the
colour, form, and music of things externalizing, visualizing the inward
mood, emotion, or passion of the singer. Nature is emptied of her
contents to become the pure inhabitancy of one human soul. The poet's
method is that of life itself, which is first awakened by the beauty
without to thought and feeling; he expresses the state evoked by that
beauty and absorbing it. He identifies himself with the objects before
him through his joy in them, and entering there makes nature translucent
with his own spirit.

Shelley's Ode to the West Wind is the eminent example of such magical
power. The three vast elements, earth, air, and water, are first brought
into a union through their connection with the west wind; and, the wind
still being the controlling centre of imagination, the poet, drawing all
this limitless and majestic imagery with him, by gradual and spontaneous
approaches identifies himself at the climax of feeling with the object
of his invocation,--

"Be thou me, impetuous one!"

and thence the poem swiftly falls to its end in a lyric burst of
personality, in which, while the body of nature is retained, there is
only a spiritual meaning. So Burns in some songs, and Keats in some
odes, following the same method, make nature their own syllables, as of
some cosmic language. This is the highest reach of the artist's power
of conveying through the concrete image the soul in its pure emotional
life; and in such poetry one feels that the whole material world seems
lent to man to expand his nature and escape from the solitude in which