intelligible as the plants and animals. The poet knows
that he speaks adequately then only when he speaks
somewhat wildly, or, "with the flower of the mind;"
not with the intellect used as an organ, but with the
intellect released from all service and suffered to
take its direction from its celestial life; or as the
ancients were wont to express themselves, not with
intellect alone but with the intellect inebriated by
nectar. As the traveller who has lost his way throws
his reins on his horse's neck and trusts to the
instinct of the animal to find his road, so must we
do with the divine animal who carries us through this
world. For if in any manner we can stimulate this
instinct, new passages are opened for us into nature;
the mind flows into and through things hardest and
highest, and the metamorphosis is possible.

This is the reason why bards love wine, mead,
narcotics, coffee, tea, opium, the fumes of sandal
-wood and tobacco, or whatever other procurers of
animal exhilaration. All men avail themselves of
such means as they can, to add this extraordinary
power to their normal powers; and to this end they
prize conversation, music, pictures, sculpture,
dancing, theatres, travelling, war, mobs, fires,
gaming, politics, or love, or science, or animal
intoxication,--which are several coarser or finer
quasi-mechanical substitutes for the true nectar,
which is the ravishment of the intellect by coming
nearer to the fact. These are auxiliaries to the