too much manufacture and not enough growth. Coleridge says, "The
difference between manufactured poems and works of genius is not less
than between an egg and an egg-shell; yet at a distance they both look
alike."

Men without depth of sensibility or breadth of nature, but with enough
sense of beauty to modulate their thoughts, using with skill the
floating capital of sentiment and the current diction and molds of
verse, for a generation are esteemed poets of more genius than they
have, their pages being elaborate verse flavored with poetry, rather
than poems. In much verse are found old thoughts re-dressed in the
scoured garments of an ambitious fancy. The remark being made to
Goethe in his latter days, that scarce one of the younger German poets
had given an example of good prose, he rejoined, "That is very
natural; he who would write prose must have something to say; but he
who has nothing to say can make verses and rhymes; for one word gives
the other, till at last you have before you what in fact is nothing,
yet looks as though it were something." There is much good-looking
verse which does not fulfill any one of Milton's primary conditions
for poetry, being artificial instead of "simple," and having
neither soul enough to be "passionate," nor body enough to be
"sensuous." By passionate Milton means imbued with feeling.

The poetical mood is always a visionary mood; so much so, that even
when the poet is depicting an actual person or scene, he must see it
with the imaginative eye, the inward eye, as well as with the outward.
Unless he does, there is no poetry in the result. A poem is twofold,
presenting an actuality, and at the same time a tender lucent image
thereof, like the reflection of a castle, standing on the edge of a
lake, in the calm deep mirror before it: at one view we see the castle