The best poetry, like the best music, soars towards the upper light.  The genuinely poetical always lifts up the thought on the swell of emotion.  The thought moves free and strong because there is a deep, bubbling head of feeling behind it.  Feeling, at its best, has an ascending movement, reaching up towards that high sphere where, through their conjunction, the earthly and the spiritual play in freedom in the sunshine of the beautiful.  The surest test of the presence of poetry is buoyancy, springiness, which comes from the union, the divine union, of the spiritual and the beautiful.  However weighty it may be with thought, the poetical passage floats, thus giving certain sign of life, of a soul irrepressible.

But as in the forest there cannot be height of stem without strength and breadth of root, the highest poetry is the most solid, the firmest set in reality, in truth.  The higher a poet is, the closer hold he has of the roots of his subject.  He looks at it with a peering, deeply sympathetic insight.  The roots, in fact, are in himself; they are in the depths of his soul.  Hence a cardinal question about a poem is, How much of it does the poet draw out of himself?  Is it his by projection from his inward resources, by injection with his own juices; or is it his only by adoption and adaptation, by dress and adjustment?

Flight of poetic imagination there cannot be unless the wings have been feathered in the heart.  Loftiness or grandeur of imagination there cannot be, except there be first innate richness and breadth of feeling.  Imagination being simply the tensest action of intellect, is ever, like intellect in all its phases, an instrument of feeling, a mere tool.  Height implies inward depth.  The gift to touch the vitals of a subject is the test-gift of literary faculty; it is the soul-gift, the gift of fuller, livelier sympathy.  Compare Wordsworth with Southey to learn the difference between inward and outward gifts.

Poetry being in the mind, the man who has little poetry within him will find little in nature or in the world or in Shakespeare.  The man who has no music in his soul will hear none at the Conservatoire in Paris.  Wordsworth sees with the inward eye, Southey too exclusively with the outward.  The true poet projects visions and rhythms out from his brain, and gazes at and hearkens to them.  The degree of the truthfulness to nature and the vividness of these projections is the measure of his poetic genius and capacity.  Only through this intense inwardness can he attain to great visions and rhythmic raptures, and make you see and hear them.  What illimitable inward sight must Keats have dwelt in ere, to depict the effect on him of looking into Chapman’s Homer, he could write,—­

  “Then felt I like some watcher of the skies,
    When a new planet swims into his ken;
  Or like stout Cortez, when with eagle eyes
    He stared at the Pacific, and all his men
  Looked at each other with a wild surmise,
    Silent, upon a peak in Darien.”