What has been done with the prose statement?  Instead of a bare fact we have a picture, a twofold picture; and this, in its compact, fresh, rose-tinted vividness, carries the whole into our hearts with a tenfold success.  Through emotional joy we apprehend, as by the light of an instantaneous ignition, the state of the sufferer.  The prose-report is a smoldering fire on the hearth, through whose sleepy smoke there comes a partial heat; the poetic is the flame in full fervor, springing upward, illuminating, warming the heart, delighting the intellect.  The imagination of the reader, quickened by illustrations so apt and original, is by their beauty tuned to its most melodious key, while by the rare play of intellectual vitality his mind is dilated.  He has become mentally a richer man, enriched through the refining and enlarging of his higher sensibilities, and the activity imparted to his intellect.

To say of a man that he is without imagination were to say he is an idiot; that is, one lacking the inward force and the inward instruments to grasp and handle the materials collected from without by perception and memory, and from within by consciousness.  To say of a poet that he is without poetic imagination were to say he is no poet.  What is poetic imagination?  This, for our theme, is a vital question.  Can there be given to it an approximate answer?

Figure to yourself a company of men and women in presence of a September sunset near the sea, the eye taking in at once ocean and a variegated landscape.  The company must not be a score of tawny American aborigines, nor of European peasants, nor of individuals whose life of monotonous labor, whether for necessaries or luxuries, has no opportunity or no will for the finer mental culture; but, to give aptness to our illustration, should consist of persons whose being has been unfolded to the tissue of susceptibility to the wonders and beauties of nature, and whose intellect has been tilled sufficiently to receive and nourish any fresh seed of thought that may be thrown upon it; in short, a score of cultivated adults.  The impression made by such a scene on such a company is heightened by a rare atmospheric calm.  The heart of each gazer fills with emotion, at first unutterable except by indefinite exclamation; when one of the company says,—­

  “A fairer face of evening cannot be.”

These words, making a smooth iambic line, give some utterance, and therefore some relief, to the feeling of all.  Then another adds,—­

  “The holy time is quiet as a nun
  Breathless with adoration.”

Instantly the whole scene, steeped in the beams of the sinking sun, is flooded with a light that illuminates the sunlight, a spiritual light.  The scene is transfigured before their eyes:  it is as if the heavens had opened, and inundated all its features with a celestial subtilizing aura.  How has this been accomplished?  The first line has little of the quality of poetic imagination.