I will now quote passages, brief ones, wherein through the poet are opened vast vistas into the shining universe, or is concentrated in single or few lines the life of man’s finer nature, as in the diamond are condensed the warmth and splendor that lie latent in acres of fossil carbon.

When, in the sixth book of “Paradise Lost,” Milton narrates the arrival on the battle-field of the Son,—­

  “Attended by ten thousand thousand saints,”

and then adds:—­

“Far off his coming shone,”

in these five short words is a sudden glare of grandeur that dilates the capable mind with light, and, as the sublime always does, with awe.

When Ferdinand, in “The Tempest,” leaps “with hair up-staring” into the sea, crying,—­

              “Hell is empty,
  And all the devils are here,”

the mind is suddenly filled with an image of the tumult and flaming rage of a thunder-storm at sea, such as words have never elsewhere carried.  What a reach in the imaginative stroke!  In the first scene of “Faust,” the earth-spirit, whom Faust has evoked, concludes the whirling, dazzling, brief, but gigantic sketch of his function with these words, the majesty of which translation cannot entirely subdue:—­

  “I ply the resounding great loom of old Time,
  And work at the Godhead’s live vesture sublime.”

How ennobling is the idea the mind harbors of humanity, after taking in these lines from Wordsworth’s “Ode on Intimations of Immortality:”—­

“But trailing clouds of glory do we come
From God, who is our home.”

With a single epithet, coined for the occasion, Keats flashes upon our imagination the dethroned Saturn and the immensity of his fall: 

                  “Upon the sodden ground
  His old right hand lay nerveless, listless, dead,
  Unsceptered; and his realmless eyes were closed.”

The “Hyperion” of this transcendent genius, written in his twenty-fourth year, the year before he died, is as great poetry as has ever been treasured in words.  In it he lavishes poetic wealth as though gold were with him as plenty as silver; and so on the next page he exceeds, if possible, the sublimity of the above lines, making Thea write in the catalogue of Saturn’s colossal deprivations,—­

                  “And all the air
  Is emptied of thine hoary majesty.”

These passages vividly exemplify poetic imagination, which is the illumining of a capable material by a spiritual light, a light thrown into it from the glow kindled in the poet’s mind with richest sensibilities, that are refined and sublimated by an exacting, subtle inward demand for the best they can render.  A single flash of new thrilling light irradiates a continent of thought.  This is the work of genius, and genius is ever marked by a deeper sympathy with and recognition of the creative spirit and the divine action, a sympathy and recognition so sensitive that the spirit and action of the writer are permeated by the divine effluence, he becoming thereby the interpreter of divine law, the exhibitor of divine beauty.