some, and rejects more; and those he accepts are such as he wants for his ulterior purpose, which will not admit the appearance of art; hence he will have none that do not grow out of his feeling and harmonize with it.  All this passes in an instant, and the apt simile or the happy epithet is created,—­an immortal beauty, both in itself and as it occurs in its place.  It was put there by an art; the poet knew that the way to make expressions come is to assume the feeling; he knew that he

  “But in a fiction, in a dream of passion,
  Could force his soul so to his own conceit”

that his whole function would suit with expressions to his conceit.  He then withdrew his judgment from within, and cheated his fancy into supposing he had given her the rein, letting the feigned state be as real to him as it could, and writing from that primarily,—­humoring Nature by his art in leaving her to do what she alone could do.  So that the very gems we admire as natural are the offspring of Nature creating under Art.  To make streaked gillyflowers, we marry a gentler scion to the wildest stock, and Nature does the rest.  So in poetry, we cannot get at the finest excellences by seeking for them directly, but we put Nature in the way to suggest them.  We do not strive to think whether “the mobled queen” is good; we do not let our vanity keep such a strict look-out upon Nature; she will not desert us, if we follow her modes,—­which we must do with all the art and fine tact we can acquire and command, not only in order to gain the minute beauties, but to compass the great whole.

The analogies that might be drawn from music would much assist in making all this clear, if they could be used with a chance of being understood.  But, unfortunately, the ability to comprehend a great work, as a whole, is even rarer in music than in poetry.  The little taking bits of melody are all that is thought of or perceived; the great epos or rhapsody, the form and meaning of the entire composition,—­which is a work of Art in no other sense than a poem is one, except that it uses, instead of speech, musical forms, of greater variety and symmetry,—­are not at all understood.  Nor is the subtile and irresistible coherence in successions of clear sunny melody, in which Mozart so abounds, in any great degree understood, even by some who call themselves artists.  They think only of the sudden flashes, the happinesses, and, if such a word may be used once only, the smartnesses,—­like children who care for nothing in their cake but the frosting and the plums.  But in continuing the study of the art with such notions of its expression, the relish for it soon cloys, the mind ceases to advance, the enthusiasm deadens, progress becomes hopeless, and the little gained is soon lost; whereas, if the student is familiarized with the most perfect forms of the art, and led on by them, both by committing a few of them to memory, and by fully understanding their structure, it will soon be evident that an intellectual study of music, pursued with a true love of it, can, more than any other study, strengthen the imaginative faculty.