intellectual action that ranges above simple perception and memory; a
power without which the daily business of life even could not go on,
being that power whereby the mind manipulates, so to speak, its
materials. In its higher phasis it may be defined as the intellect
stimulated by feeling to multiply its efforts for the ends of feeling;
and in its highest it may be said to be intellect winged by
emotion to go forth and gather honey from the bloom of creation.

Imagination, then, being intellect in keenest chase, and the
intellectual part of the mind being, when moved in concert with the
effective part, but a tool of this, what are the feelings or
conditions of feeling of which intellect becomes the instrument in the
production of poetry?

Cast your look on a page filled with the titles of Shakespeare's
plays. What worlds of throbbing life lie behind that roll! Then run
over the persons of a single drama: that one bounded inclosure, how
rich in variety and intensity, and truth of feeling! And when you
shall have thus cursorily sent your mind through each and all, tragic,
comic, historic, lyric, you will have traversed in thought,
accompanied by hundreds of infinitely diversified characters, wide
provinces of human sorrow and joy. Why are these pictures of passion
so uniquely prized, passed on from generation to generation, the most
precious heir-loom of the English tongue, to-day as fresh as on the
morning when the paper was moist with the ink wherewith they were
first written? Because they have in them more fullness and fineness
and fidelity than any others. The poet has more life in him
than other men, and Shakespeare has in him more life than any other
poet, life manifested through power of intellect exalted through union
with power of sympathy, the embodiments whereof are rounded, enlarged,