"And take
The winds of March with beauty."

Every one is taken at some time or other with the beauty of person or
thing, and the thought is common; but that the winds of March be taken
with the beauty of daffodils, this was a delicate secret which those
winds would confide only to one so sympathetic as Shakespeare. This is
poetic imagination, the intellect sent on far errands by a sensibility
which is at once generous and bold, and fastidious through the
promptings and the exactions of the beautiful.

In the opening of "Il Penseroso" Milton describes the shapes that in
sprightly moods possess the fancy,

"As thick and numberless
As the gay motes that _people_ the sunbeams."

Put _shine in_ the sunbeams, for _people_, and, notwithstanding the
luminousness of the word substituted, you take the sparkle out of the
line, which sparkle is imparted by mental activity, and the poetic
dash that has the delightful audacity to personify such atomies.

The poetical is the flush on the face of things in the
unconscious triumph of their purest life, cognizable by being beheld
at the moment when the higher faculties are at their fullest flood,
buoyed up on the joy of being and emotional sympathy. The most and the
highest of this joy is possessed by him whose imagination is most
capable of being poetically agitated; for by such agitation light is
engendered within him, whereby objects and sensations that before were
dim and opaque grow luminous and pellucid, like great statuary in