for Shakespeare, _the world lies all translucent, all fusible_ we might
call it, encircled with _Wonder_; the Natural in reality the Supernatural,
for to the seer's eyes both become one."

In his essay on Tieck Carlyle remarks again upon this characteristic of
the mind of the typical poet: "He is no mere observer and compiler;
rendering back to us, with additions or subtractions, the Beauty which
existing things have of themselves presented to him; but a true Maker, to
whom the actual and external is but the excitement for ideal creations
representing and ennobling its effects."

Coleridge's formula is briefer still; the imagination "dissolves,
diffuses, dissipates, in order to re-create."
[Footnote: _Biographia Literaria_.]

Such passages help us to understand the mystical moments which many poets
have recorded, in which their feeling of "diffusion" has led them to doubt
the existence of the external world. Wordsworth grasping "at a wall or
tree to recall myself from this abyss of idealism to the reality," and
Tennyson's "weird seizures" which he transferred from his own experience
to his imaginary Prince in _The Princess_, are familiar examples of this
type of mysticism. But the sense of the infinite fusibility and change in
the objective world is deeper than that revealed in any one type of
diffluent imagination. It is a profound characteristic of the poetic
mind as such. Yet it should be remembered that the philosopher and
the scientist likewise assert that ours is a vital, ever-flowing,
onward-urging world, in the process of "becoming" rather than merely
"being." "We are far from the noon of man" sang Tennyson, in a
late-Victorian and evolutionary version of St. John's "It doth not
yet appear what we shall be." "The primary imagination," asserted