the besieged themselves are charmed with them. Whoever reads the great
poets cannot but be made better by it, for they always introduce him to
a higher society, to a greater style of manners and of thinking. Whoever
learns to love what is beautiful is made incapable of the low and mean
and bad. If Plato excludes the poets from his Republic, it is expressly
on the ground that they speak unworthy things of the gods; that is, that
they have lost the secret of their art, and use artificial types instead
of speaking the true universal language of imagination. He who
translates the divine into the vulgar, the spiritual into the sensual,
is the reverse of a poet.

The poet, under whatever name, always stands for the same
thing--imagination. And imagination in its highest form gives him the
power, as it were, of assuming the consciousness of whatever he speaks
about, whether man or beast, or rock or tree, fit is the ring of Canace,
which whoso has on understands the language of all created things. And
as regards expression, it seems to enable the poet to condense the whole
of himself into a single word. Therefore, when a great poet has said a
thing, it is finally and utterly expressed, and has as many meanings as
there are men who read his verse. A great poet is something more than an
interpreter between man and nature; he is also an interpreter between
man and his own nature. It is he who gives us those key-words, the
possession of which makes us masters of all the unsuspected
treasure-caverns of thought, and feeling, and beauty which open under
the dusty path of our daily life.

And it is not merely a dry lexicon that he compiles,--a thing which
enables us to translate from one dead dialect into another as dead,--but
all his verse is instinct with music, and his words open windows on
every side to pictures of scenery and life. The difference between the