"Oh, Lady, we receive but what we give,
And in our life alone does Nature live."

This "animism," or identifying imagination, by means of which the child or
the primitive man or the poet transfers his own life into the unorganic or
organic world, is one of the oldest and surest indications of poetic
faculty, and as far as we can see, it is antecedent to the use of verbal
images or symbols.

Another characteristic of the poetic temperament, allied with the
preceding, likewise seems to belong in the region where words are not as
yet emerging above the threshold of consciousness. I mean the strange
feeling, witnessed to by many poets, of the fluidity, fusibility,
transparency--the infinitely changing and interchangeable aspects--of the
world as it appears to the senses. It is evident that poets are not
looking--at least when in this mood--at our "logical" world of hard, clear
fact and law. They are gazing rather at what Whitman called "the eternal
float of solution," the "flowing of all things" of the Greeks, the
"river within the river" of Emerson. This tendency is peculiarly marked,
of course, in artists possessing the "diffluent" type of imagination, and
Romantic poets and critics have had much to say about it. The imagination,
said Wordsworth, "recoils from everything but the plastic, the pliant, the
indefinite."
[Footnote: Preface to 1815 edition of his _Poems_.]
"Shakespeare, too," says Carlye,
[Footnote: Essay on Goethe's Works.]
"does not look _at_ a thing, but into it, through it; so that he
constructively comprehends it, can take it asunder and put it together
again; _the thing melts as it were, into light under his eye, and anew
creates itself before him_. That is to say, he is a Poet. For Goethe, as