Beckford, of a sensuously poetic nature, having command of vast
wealth, brought his castle in the air down to the ground, and dazzled
his contemporaries with Fonthill Abbey. Not only are Fonthill Abbeys
and all beautiful buildings achieved through the warm action of the
poetic faculty, but all improvements are brought about by its virtue.
Out of this deep, inward, creative power issue all theories and
practice for the bettering of human conditions. All original founders
and discoverers are poets: the most poetic French mind I know is that
of Fourier.

When a mind, having the texture and expansibility to become surcharged
with magnetic effluence, has moreover that æsthetic gift of rhythmic
expression which involves a sense of the beautiful, that is, of the
high and exquisite possibilities of created things,--when such a mind,
under the pressure of inward needs, betakes it to embodying in verse
its imaginations and conceptions, the result is poetry. _Poetry is
thought so inly warmed by creative sensibility as to overflow in
musical cadence._ And when we consider that thought is the gathering
of loose intellectual activity into a fast focus; that creative
sensibility is human feeling refined of its dross, stilled of its
tumultuousness in the glow of the beautiful; that musical cadence is
heard by him who can hearken with such rapt reverence as to catch some
sound of the tread in divine movement, we may apprehend that a genuine
poem implies, for its conception, an illuminated plenitude of mind,
and involves in its production a beatific visionariness.




III.