springily on a ladder self-wrought out of the brain as he ascends; and thus there is a prompt continuity and progressiveness, a forward and upward movement towards the climax which ever awaits you in a subject that has a poem in it.  In a genuine poem, a work of inspiration and not mainly of art, there is brisk evolution, phase of feeling climbing over phase, thought kindled by thought seizing unexpected links of association.  This gives sure note of the presence of the matrix out of which poetry molds itself, that is, sensibility warm and deep, penetrating sympathy.  Where evolution and upward movement are not, it is a sign that the spring lacks depth and is too much fed by surface streams from without.

Through a poem should run a thread of emotional thought, strong enough to bind the parts together so vividly as to hold attention close to the substance.  Many a so-called poem is but a string of elaborate stanzas, mostly of four lines each, too slightly connected to cooperate as members of an organic whole.  There is not heat enough in the originating impulse to fuse the parts into unity.  There is too much manufacture and not enough growth.  Coleridge says, “The difference between manufactured poems and works of genius is not less than between an egg and an egg-shell; yet at a distance they both look alike.”

Men without depth of sensibility or breadth of nature, but with enough sense of beauty to modulate their thoughts, using with skill the floating capital of sentiment and the current diction and molds of verse, for a generation are esteemed poets of more genius than they have, their pages being elaborate verse flavored with poetry, rather than poems.  In much verse are found old thoughts re-dressed in the scoured garments of an ambitious fancy.  The remark being made to Goethe in his latter days, that scarce one of the younger German poets had given an example of good prose, he rejoined, “That is very natural; he who would write prose must have something to say; but he who has nothing to say can make verses and rhymes; for one word gives the other, till at last you have before you what in fact is nothing, yet looks as though it were something.”  There is much good-looking verse which does not fulfill any one of Milton’s primary conditions for poetry, being artificial instead of “simple,” and having neither soul enough to be “passionate,” nor body enough to be “sensuous.”  By passionate Milton means imbued with feeling.

The poetical mood is always a visionary mood; so much so, that even when the poet is depicting an actual person or scene, he must see it with the imaginative eye, the inward eye, as well as with the outward.  Unless he does, there is no poetry in the result.  A poem is twofold, presenting an actuality, and at the same time a tender lucent image thereof, like the reflection of a castle, standing on the edge of a lake, in the calm deep mirror before it:  at one view we see the castle and its glistening counterpart.