is obliged to admit that the poet cannot always trust his vision. She
muses over the title of poet:

The name
Is royal, and to sign it like a queen
Is what I dare not--though some royal blood
Would seem to tingle in me now and then
With sense of power and ache,--with imposthumes
And manias usual to the race. Howbeit
I dare not: 'tis too easy to go mad
And ape a Bourbon in a crown of straws;
The thing's too common.
[Footnote: _Aurora Leigh_. See also the lines in the same poem,
For me, I wrote
False poems, like the rest, and thought them true
Because myself was true in writing them.]

Has the poet, then, no guarantee for the genuineness of his inspiration?
Must he wait as ignorantly as his contemporaries for the judgment of
posterity? One cannot conceive of the grandly egoistic poet saying this.
Yet the enthusiast must not believe every spirit, but try them whether
they be of God. What is his proof?

Emerson suggests a test, in a poem by that name. He avers,

I hung my verses in the wind.
Time and tide their faults may find.
All were winnowed through and through:
Five lines lasted sound and true;
Five were smelted in a pot