Now, the enjoyment of the few appreciators, what is its source?  By these passages certain feelings in them are made to vibrate and are pitched to a high key.  A very comprehensive word is feelings.  What is the nature of those feelings thus wrought upon?

The elementary feelings of our nature, when in healthful function, are capable of emitting spiritual light; and, when exalted to their purest action, do and must emit such, the inward fire sending forth clear flame unmixed with smoke.  To perceive this light, and, still more, to have your path illuminated thereby, implies the present activity of some of the higher human sensibilities; and to be so organized as to be able to embody in words, after having imagined, personages, conditions, and conjunctions whence this light shall flash on and ignite the sensibilities of others, implies, besides vivid sympathies and delight in the beautiful, a susceptibility to the manifestations of moral and intellectual life which is enjoyed only by him in whom the nobler elements of being are present in such intensity, proportions, and quality, and are so commingled, that he can reproduce life itself with translucent truthfulness, he becoming, through this exalting susceptibility, poet or maker.

What constitutes the wealth of human life?  Is it not fullness and richness of feeling?  To refine this fullness, to purify this richness, to distill the essence out of this wealth, to educate the feelings by revealing their subtle possibilities, by bringing to light the divinity there is within and behind them, this is the poet’s part; and this, his great part, he can only do by being blest with more than common sympathy with the spirit of the Almighty Creator, and thence clearer insight into his work and will.  Merely to embody in verse the feelings, thoughts, deeds, scenes of human life, is not the poet’s office; but to exhibit these as having attained, or as capable of attaining, the power and beauty and spirituality possible to each.  The glorifier of humanity the poet is, not its mere reporter; that is the historian’s function.  The poet’s business is not with facts as such, or with inferences, but with truth of feeling, and the very spirit of truth.  His function is ideal; that is, from the prosaic, the individual, the limited, he is to lift us up to the universal, the generic, the boundless.  In compassing this noble end he may, if such be his bent, use the facts and feelings and individualities of daily life; and, by illuminating and ennobling them he will approve his human insight, as well as his poetic gift.

The generic in sentiment, the universal, the infinite, can only be reached and recognized through the higher feelings, through those whose activity causes emotion.  The simple impulses, the elementary loves, are in themselves bounded in their action near and direct; but growing round the very fountain of life, having their roots in the core of being, they are liable to strike beyond their individual limits, and this