“A fairer face of evening cannot be.”

is simple and appropriate, but in it there is no fresh glow, no mysterious throb.  Above the level of this line rise suddenly the first three words of the second, “the holy time.”  The presence of a scene where sky, earth, and ocean combine for the delight of the beholders puts them in a mood which crowns the landscape with a religious halo.  That the time is holy they all feel; and now, to make its tranquillity appreciable by filling the heart with it, the poet adds—­“is quiet as a nun breathless with adoration.”  By this master-stroke of poetic power the atmospheric earthly calm is vivified with, is changed into, super-earthly calm.  By a fresh burst of spiritual light the mind is set aesthetically aglow, as by the beams of the setting sun the landscape is physically.  By an exceptionally empowered hand the soul is strung to a high key.  Fullness and range of sensibility open to the poet[4] a wide field of illustration; its exacting fineness reveals the one that carries his thought into the depths of the reader’s mind, bringing him that exquisite joy caused by keen intellectual power in the service of pure emotion.

    [4] Wordsworth.

Take now other samples from the treasury of choicest poetry.  Here is one from Coleridge:—­

      “And winter, slumbering in the open air,
  Wears on his smiling face a dream of spring.”

Here again the intellect is urged to its highest action, the abstract or imaginative action, to do the hests of a sensibility so finely wrought by the inward impulsion to seek for the most exquisite that nature can furnish, that it yields similitudes most delicate, most apt, most expressive.

Milton thus opens the fifth book of “Paradise Lost:”—­

  “Now morn, her rosy steps in the eastern clime
  Advancing, sowed the earth with orient pearl.”

Shakespeare makes Romeo describe daybreak:—­

                        “And jocund day
  Stands tiptoe on the misty mountain-tops.”

Keats begins “Hyperion” with these lines: 

“Deep in the shady sadness of a vale,
Far sunken from the healthy breath of morn.”

In the Monody on Keats, Shelley, describing the lamentation of nature at his death, concludes a stanza as follows:—­

                      “Morning sought
    Her eastern watch-tower, and, her hair unbound,
    Wet with the tears that should adorn the ground,
    Dimmed the aerial eyes that kindle day;
    Afar the melancholy thunder moaned,
    Pale Ocean in unquiet slumber lay,
  And the wild winds flew around, sobbing in their dismay.”

Such passages are the very flower of poetry, thought exquisitely dyed in sentiment, laying suddenly bare a picture with so much light in it that each passage irradiates its page and the reader’s mind.  By their happiness the similitudes emphasize and enforce the thought; and they do a higher service than this; for, being a breath from the inner life of genius, they blow power into the reader.  To translate these passages into prose were like trying to translate a lily into the mold out of which it springs, or a bar of Beethoven into the sounds of the forum, or the sparkle of stars into the warmth of a coal fire.