“As thick and numberless
  As the gay motes that people the sunbeams.”

Put shine in the sunbeams, for people, and, notwithstanding the luminousness of the word substituted, you take the sparkle out of the line, which sparkle is imparted by mental activity, and the poetic dash that has the delightful audacity to personify such atomies.

The poetical is the flush on the face of things in the unconscious triumph of their purest life, cognizable by being beheld at the moment when the higher faculties are at their fullest flood, buoyed up on the joy of being and emotional sympathy.  The most and the highest of this joy is possessed by him whose imagination is most capable of being poetically agitated; for by such agitation light is engendered within him, whereby objects and sensations that before were dim and opaque grow luminous and pellucid, like great statuary in twilight or moonlight, standing vague and unvalued until a torch is waved over it.

When we begin to speak of poetry, the higher qualities of the mind come up for judgment.  No genuine poet is without one or more of these, and a great poet must have most of them.  Thence the thought of the poet is pitched on a high key, and even in poets of power the poetry of a page is sometimes shown merely by the sustained tone of the sentiment, giving out no jets of fire, having no passages salient with golden embossings.  Through sympathy and sense of beauty, the poet gets nearer to the absolute nature of things; and thence, with little of imagery, or coloring, or passion, through this holy influence he becomes poetic, depicting by re-creating the object or feeling or condition, and rising naturally into rhythmic lines and sentences, the best substance asking for, and readily obtaining, the most suitable form of words.  Yet a poet of inward resources can seldom write a page without there being heard a note or bar or passage of the finer melody.

But men wanting this inward wealth, that is, wanting depth and breadth of emotional capacity, have not, whatever their other gifts, the soil needed for highly imaginative poetry.  With broad emphasis this aesthetic law is exemplified in the verse of Voltaire, especially in his dramas, and in the verse of one who was deeper and higher than he as thinker and critic, of Lessing.  Skillful versifiers, by help of fancy and a certain plastic aptitude and laborious culture, are enabled to give to smooth verse a flavor of poetry and to achieve a temporary reputation.  But of such uninspired workmanship the gilding after a while wears off, the externally imparted perfume surely evaporates.

Often the most suitable form of words is made of plainest, commonest parts of speech, and the fewest of them.  The more intense and deep the feeling, the greater is the need of briefest, simplest utterance.  When in one of those pauses of frantic wrath,—­like the sudden rifts that momentarily let the calm stars through a whirling canopy of storm,—­Lear utters imploringly that appeal to Heaven, the words are the familiar words of hourly use; but what divine tenderness and what sweep of power in three lines!