they do with power when under their sway the whole being is roused and expanded.  When by their movement the better nature is urged to heroism and self-sacrifice, as in the story of Damon and Pythias, the reader or beholder is lifted into the atmosphere of finest emotion; for then the impulse has reached its acme of function, and playing in the noonday of the beautiful, the contemplation of it purges and dilates us.  We are upraised to the disinterested mood, the poetical, in which mood there is ever imaginative activity refined by spiritual necessities.  It is not extravagant to affirm that when act or thought reaches the beautiful, it resounds through the whole being, tuning it like a high strain of sweetest music.  Thus in the poetical (and there is no poetry until the sphere of the beautiful is entered) there is always a reverberation from the emotional nature.  Reverberation implies space, an ample vault of roof or of heaven.  In a tight, small chamber there can be none.  If feeling is shut within itself, there is no reecho.  Its explosion must rebound from the roomy dome of sentiment, in order that it become musical.

The moment you enter the circle of the beautiful, into which you can only be ushered by a light within yourself, a light kindled through livelier recognition of the divine spirit,—­the moment you draw breath in this circle you find yourself enlarged, spiritualized, buoyed above the self.  No matter how surrounded, or implicated, or enthralled, while you are there, be it but for a few moments, you are liberated.

  “No more—­no more—­oh! never more on me
  The freshness of the heart can fall like dew,
  Which out of all the lovely things we see
  Extracts emotions beautiful and new,
  Hived in our bosoms like the bag o’ the bee. 
  Think’st thou the honey with those objects grew? 
  Alas! ’t was not in them, but in thy power
  To double even the sweetness of a flower.”

                “All who joy would win
  Must share it; happiness was born a twin.”

  “He entered in the house,—­his home no more,
  For without hearts there is no home—­and felt
  The solitude of passing his own door
  Without a welcome; there he long had dwelt,
  There his few peaceful days Time had swept o’er,
  There his worn, bosom and keen eye would melt
  Over the innocence of that sweet child,
  His only shrine of feelings undefiled.”

These three passages are from a poem in which there is more wit than poetry, and more cynicism than either; a poem in spirit unsanctified, Mephistophelian, written by a man of the world, a terrible egotist, blase already in early manhood, in whose life, through organization, inherited temperament, and miseducation, humanity was so cramped, distorted, envenomed, that the best of it was in the fiery sway of the more urgent passions, his inmost life being, as it must always be with poets, inwoven into his verse.  From the expiring volcano in his bosom his genius, in this poem, casts upon the world a lurid flame, making life look pale or fever-flushed.  With unslumbering vivacity, human nature is exhibited in that misleading light made by the bursting of half-truths that relate to its lower side, a light the more deceptions from the sparkling accompaniment of satire and wit.