The secret seems to lie in the temperament and in the transmuting and modifying medium.  More or less of filtration does it all.  Nature makes the poet, not by adding to, but by taking from; she takes all blur and opacity out of him; condenses, intensifies; lifts his nerves nearer the surface, sharpens his senses, and brings his whole organization to an edge.  Sufficient filtration would convert charcoal into diamonds; and we shall everywhere find that the purest, most precious substances are the result of a refining, sorting, condensing process.

Our expression is clogged by the rubbish in our minds, the foolish personal matters we load the memory with.  Ideas are not clearly defined, as the drift-wood in the river spoils the reflected image.  We feel nothing intensely; our experience is a blur without distinct form and outline; in short we are incumbered with too much clay.  Hence, when a slow disease burns the dross and earth out of one, how keen and susceptible his organization becomes!  The mud-wall grows transparent.  Our senses lose their obtuseness, our capacity both for experience and expression is enlarged, and we not only live deeper, but nearer the surface.

It appears, then, that, as a general rule, our ability to express ourselves is in proportion to the fineness of our organization.  Women, for this reason, are more adequate in expressing themselves than men; they stand removed one degree farther from the earth, and are conscious of feelings and sentiments that are never defined in our minds; the detachment is more perfect; shades and boundaries are more clearly brought out, and consequently the statement is more round and full.

One’s capacity for expression is also affected by his experience,—­not experience in time and space, but soul-experience,—­joy, sorrow, pleasure, pain, love, hope, aspiration, and all intense feeling by which the genesis of the inward man unfolded.  What one has lived, that alone can he adequately say.  The outward is the measure of the inward; it is as the earth and sky:  so much earth as we see, so much sky takes form and outline.  The spiritual, it is true, is illimitable, but the actual is the measure of that part of which we are made conscious.  Experience furnishes the handle, but the intellect must supply the blade.

Intense feeling of any kind afterward gives us more entire command over some thought or power within us.  Every inundation of passion enriches and gives us a deeper soil.  The most painful experiences are generally the most productive.  Cutting teeth is by no means a pleasant operation, yet it increases our tools.  Our lives are not thoroughly shaped out and individualized till we have lived and suffered in every part of us.  A great feeling reveals new powers in the soul, as a deep breath fills air-cells in the lungs that are not reached by an ordinary inhalation.  Love first revealed the poetic gift in Novalis; and in reading the Autobiography of Goethe, one can but notice the quickening of his powers after every new experience:  a new love was a new push given the shuttle, and a new thread was added.