and recording natural phenomena sharpens the sense of poets, as it does
the senses of Indians, naturalists, sailors and all outdoors men. The
quick eye for costume and character possessed by a Chaucer or a Shakspere
is remarkable, but equally so is the observation of a Dickens or a Balzac.
It is rather in what we call psychical vision that the poet is wont to
excel, that is, in his ability to perceive the meaning of visual
phenomena. Here he ceases to be a mere reporter of retinal images, and
takes upon himself the higher and harder function of an interpreter of the
visible world. He has no immunity from the universal human experiences: he
loves and he is angry and he sees men born and die. He becomes according
to the measure of his intellectual capacity a thinker. He strives to see
into the human heart, to comprehend the working of the human mind. He
reads the divine justice in the tragic fall of Kings. He penetrates
beneath the external forms of Nature and perceives her as a "living
presence." Yet the faculty of vision which the poet possesses in so
eminent a degree is shared by many who are not poets. Darwin's outward eye
was as keen as Wordsworth's; St. Paul's sense of the reality of the
invisible world is more wonderful than Shakspere's. The poet is indeed
first of all a seer, but he must be something more than a seer before he
is wholly poet.

Another mark of the poetic mind is its vivid sense of relations. The part
suggests the whole. In the single instance there is a hint of the general
law. The self-same Power that brings the fresh rhodora to the woods brings
the poet there also. In the field-mouse, the daisy, the water-fowl, he
beholds types and symbols. His own experience stands for all men's. The
conscience-stricken Macbeth is a poet when he cries, "Life is a walking
shadow," and King Lear makes the same pathetic generalization when he
exclaims, "What, have his daughters brought him to this pass?" Through the
shifting phenomena of the present the poet feels the sweep of the