foreruns the identities of the spiritual world. A single glance of it mocks
all the investigations of man, and all the instruments and books of the
earth, and all reasoning. What is marvellous? what is unlikely? what is
impossible or baseless or vague? after you have once just opened the space
of a peachpit, and given audience to far and near and to the sunset, and
had all things enter with electric swiftness, softly and duly, without
confusion or jostling or jam.

The land and sea, the animals, fishes, and birds, the sky of heaven and the
orbs, the forests, mountains, and rivers, are not small themes: but folks
expect of the poet to indicate more than the beauty and dignity which
always attach to dumb real objects,--they expect him to indicate the path
between reality and their souls. Men and women perceive the beauty well
enough--probably as well as he. The passionate tenacity of hunters,
woodmen, early risers, cultivators of gardens and orchards and fields, the
love of healthy women for the manly form, seafaring persons, drivers of
horses, the passion for light and the open air, all is an old varied sign
of the unfailing perception of beauty, and of a residence of the poetic, in
outdoor people. They can never be assisted by poets to perceive: some may,
but they never can. The poetic quality is not marshalled in rhyme or
uniformity, or abstract addresses to things, nor in melancholy complaints
or good precepts, but is the life of these and much else, and is in the
soul. The profit of rhyme is that it drops seeds of a sweeter and more
luxuriant rhyme; and of uniformity, that it conveys itself into its own
roots in the ground out of sight. The rhyme and uniformity of perfect poems
show the free growth of metrical laws, and bud from them as unerringly and
loosely as lilacs or roses on a bush, and take shapes as compact as the
shapes of chestnuts and oranges and melons and pears, and shed the perfume
impalpable to form. The fluency and ornaments of the finest poems or music
or orations or recitations are not independent, but dependent. All beauty