Without Analogy, without this marrying of the inward and the outward, there can be no speech, no expression.  It is a necessity of our condition.  Spirit is cognizable by us only when endowed with a material body; so an idea or a feeling can be stated only when it puts on the form and definiteness of the sensuous, the empirical.  Hence the highest utterance is a perpetual marrying of thought with things, as in poetry,—­a lifting up of the actual and a bringing down of the ideal,—­giving a soul to the one and a body to the other.  This takes place more or less in all speech, but only with genius is it natural and complete.  Ordinary minds inherit their language and form of expression; but with the poet, or natural sayer, a new step is taken, and new analogies, new likenesses must be disclosed.  He is distinguished from the second-hand man by the fulness and completeness of his expression; his words are round and embrace the two hemispheres, the actual and the ideal.  He points out analogies under our feet, and presents the near and the remote wedded in every act of his mind.  Nothing is old with him, but Nature is forever new like the day, and gives him pure and fresh thoughts as she gives him pure and fresh water.  Hence the expressiveness of poetry and its power over the human heart.  It differs from prose only in degree, not in essence.  It goes farther and accomplishes more.  It is the blossom of which prose is the bud, and comes with sincerity, simplicity, purity of motive, and a vital relation to Nature.

As men grow earnest and impassioned, and speak from their inmost heart, and without any secondary ends, their language rises to the dignity of poetry and employs tropes and figures.  The more emphatic the statement, the more the thought is linked with things.  The ideas of men in their ordinary mood are only half-expressed, like a stone propped up, but still sod-bound; but when they are fired and glowing with the heat of some great passion, the operation of the mind is more complete and the detachment more perfect.  The thought is not only evolved, but is thrown into the air,—­disencumbered from the understanding, and set off against the clear blue of the imagination.  Hence the direct and unequivocal statement of a man writing under the impulse of some strong feeling, or speaking to a thrilled and an excited audience.  Nature, the world, his experience, is no longer hard and flinty, but plastic and yielding, and takes whatever impress his mind gives it.  Facts float through his head like half-pressed grapes in the wine-press, steeped and saturated with meaning, and his expression becomes so round and complete as to astonish himself in his calmer moments.

People differ not so much in material as in this power of expressing it.  The secret of the best writer lies in his art.  He is not so much above the common stature; his experience is no richer than ours; but he knows how to put handles to his ideas, and we do not.  Give a peasant his power of expression, or of welding the world within to the world without, and there would be no very precipitous inequality between them.  The great writer says what we feel, but could not utter.  We have pearls that lie no deeper than his, but have not his art of bringing them to the surface.  We are mostly like an inland lake that has no visible outlet; while he is the same lake gifted with a copious channel.