"Consider the lilies of the field; they toil not, neither do they spin:
yet Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these." A glance,
that, into the deepest deep of Beauty. "The lilies of the field,"--dressed
finer than earthly princes, springing up there in the humble furrow-field;
a beautiful _eye_ looking out on you, from the great inner Sea of Beauty!
How could the rude Earth make these, if her Essence, rugged as she looks
and is, were not inwardly Beauty? In this point of view, too, a saying of
Goethe's, which has staggered several, may have meaning: "The Beautiful,"
he intimates, "is higher than the Good; the Beautiful includes in it the
Good." The _true_ Beautiful; which however, I have said somewhere,
"differs from the _false_ as Heaven does from Vauxhall!" So much for the
distinction and identity of Poet and Prophet.--

In ancient and also in modern periods we find a few Poets who are accounted
perfect; whom it were a kind of treason to find fault with. This is
noteworthy; this is right: yet in strictness it is only an illusion. At
bottom, clearly enough, there is no perfect Poet! A vein of Poetry exists
in the hearts of all men; no man is made altogether of Poetry. We are all
poets when we _read_ a poem well. The "imagination that shudders at the
Hell of Dante," is not that the same faculty, weaker in degree, as Dante's
own? No one but Shakspeare can embody, out of _Saxo Grammaticus_, the
story of _Hamlet_ as Shakspeare did: but every one models some kind of
story out of it; every one embodies it better or worse. We need not spend
time in defining. Where there is no specific difference, as between round
and square, all definition must be more or less arbitrary. A man that has
_so_ much more of the poetic element developed in him as to have become
noticeable, will be called Poet by his neighbors. World-Poets too, those
whom we are to take for perfect Poets, are settled by critics in the same
way. One who rises _so_ far above the general level of Poets will, to such
and such critics, seem a Universal Poet; as he ought to do. And yet it is,