The words or phrases italicized carry a larger, or a deeper or a finer meaning than the corresponding ones in the substituted lines.  To behold is more than to see:  it is to see contemplatively.  The figure prosopopoeia is often but an impotent straining to impart poetic life; but the personification in in his motion is apt and effective. Quiring is an amplification of the immediately preceding sings, and, signifying to sing in company with others, enlarges, while making more specific, the thought.  And what an image of the freshness of heaven and of youthful immortality is conveyed by the epithet young-eyed!  At every step the thought is expanded and beautiful, reaching at the end of the third line a climax on which the poetically excited mind is left poised in delight.

But the passage transformed, and, as we might say, degraded, is still poetical.  There is so much poetry in the thought that the flattening of the phraseology cannot smother it, the lines still remaining poetically alive, their poetry shining through the plainer and less figurative words.  And the thought is poetical because it is the result of a flight of intellect made by aid of imagination’s wings, these being moved by the soaring demands of the beautiful, and beating an atmosphere exhaled from sensibility.  As Joubert says,—­herein uttering a cardinal aesthetic principle,—­“It is, above all, in the spirituality of ideas that poetry consists.”  Thought that is poetic will glisten through the plainest words; whereas, if the thought be prosaic or trite, all the gilded epithets in the dictionary will not give it the poetic sheen.  Perdita wishes for

                            “Daffodils
  That come before the swallow dares, and take
  The winds of March with beauty.”

Note the poetic potency in the simple word dares; how much it carries:  the cold which the swallow has not the courage to confront; a mental action, I might almost call it, in the swallow, who, after making a recognizance of the season, determines that it would be rash to venture so far north:  all this is in the single word.  For dares write does, and the effect would be like that of cutting a gash in a rising balloon:  you would let the line suddenly down, because you take the life out of the thought.

                    “And take
  The winds of March with beauty.”

Every one is taken at some time or other with the beauty of person or thing, and the thought is common; but that the winds of March be taken with the beauty of daffodils, this was a delicate secret which those winds would confide only to one so sympathetic as Shakespeare.  This is poetic imagination, the intellect sent on far errands by a sensibility which is at once generous and bold, and fastidious through the promptings and the exactions of the beautiful.

In the opening of “Il Penseroso” Milton describes the shapes that in sprightly moods possess the fancy,