clearing and cleansing the Idea for us (in the manner described) he does
but employ a process of Selection which all men are employing, all day
long and every day of their lives, upon more trivial matters; a process
indeed which every man is constantly obliged to employ. Life would be a
night-mare for him, soon over, if he had to take account, for example,
of every object flashed on the retina of his eye during a country walk.
How many millions of leaves, stones, blades of grass, must he not see
without seeing? Say it be the shortest of rambles on an afternoon in
early November. The light fades early: but before he reaches home in the
dark, how many of the myriad falling leaves has he counted?--a dozen at
most. Of the myriad leaves changing colour does he preserve, unless by
chance, the separate image of one? Rather from the mass over which his
eyes have travelled he has abstracted an "idea" of autumnal
colouring--yellow, red, brown--and with that he carries home a
sentimental, perhaps even a profound, sense of the falling leaf, the
falling close of the year. So--and just so, save more deftly--the Poet
abstracts:--

_Where is the prime of Summer--the green prime--
The many, many leaves all twinkling?--Three
On the moss'd elm; three on the naked lime
Trembling; and one upon the old oak tree!_

(As a matter of fact, oak leaves are singularly tenacious, and the
autumnal oak will show a thousand for the elm's one. Hood, being a
Cockney, took his seven leaves at random. But what does it matter? He
was a poet, and seven leaves sufficed him to convey the idea.)

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