personality.

The passages I have cited are all pictures of outward nature, natural
scenes mirrored on the mind, or rather refracted through it, and in
the act transfigured, spiritualized; for such scenes, having
the fortune to fall on the minds of poets, are reproduced with joyful
revelation of their inmost being, as sunbeams are through a crystal
prism. Exhibiting material nature spiritualized, well do these
passages show the uplifting character of poetic imagination. But this
displays a higher, and its highest power when, striking like a
thunderbolt into the core of things, it lays bare mysteries of God and
of the heart which mere prosaic reason cannot solve or approach,
cannot indeed alone even dimly apprehend.

I will now quote passages, brief ones, wherein through the poet are
opened vast vistas into the shining universe, or is concentrated in
single or few lines the life of man's finer nature, as in the diamond
are condensed the warmth and splendor that lie latent in acres of
fossil carbon.

When, in the sixth book of "Paradise Lost," Milton narrates the
arrival on the battle-field of the Son,--

"Attended by ten thousand thousand saints,"

and then adds:--

"Far off his coming shone,"

in these five short words is a sudden glare of grandeur that dilates