he never saw such before, but he disposes of them as
easily as the poet finds place for the railway. The
chief value of the new fact is to enhance the great
and constant fact of Life, which can dwarf any and
every circumstance, and to which the belt of wampum
and the commerce of America are alike.

The world being thus put under the mind for verb
and noun, the poet is he who can articulate it.
For though life is great, and fascinates, and absorbs;
and though all men are intelligent of the symbols
through which it is named; yet they cannot originally
use them. We are symbols and inhabit symbols; workmen,
work, and tools, words and things, birth and death,
all are emblems; but we sympathize with the symbols,
and being infatuated with the economical uses of
things, we do not know that they are thoughts. The
poet, by an ulterior intellectual perception, gives
them a power which makes their old use forgotten, and
puts eyes and a tongue into every dumb and inanimate
object. He perceives the independence of the thought
on the symbol, the stability of the thought, the
accidency and fugacity of the symbol. As the eyes of
Lyncaeus were said to see through the earth, so the
poet turns the world to glass, and shows us all
things in their right series and procession. For
through that better perception he stands one step
nearer to things, and sees the flowing or metamorphosis;
perceives that thought is multiform; that within the
form of every creature is a force impelling it to ascend