Without effort and without exposing in the least how it is done the greatest poet brings the spirit of any or all events and passions and scenes and persons some more and some less to bear on your individual character as you hear or read.  To do this well is to compete with the laws that pursue and follow time.  What is the purpose must surely be there and the clue of it must be there ... and the faintest indication is the indication of the best and then becomes the clearest indication.  Past and present and future are not disjoined but joined.  The greatest poet forms the consistence of what is to be from what has been and is.  He drags the dead out of their coffins and stands them again on their feet ... he says to the past, Rise and walk before me that I may realize you.  He learns the lesson ... he places himself where the future becomes present.  The greatest poet does not only dazzle his rays over character and scenes and passions ... he finally ascends and finishes all ... he exhibits the pinnacles that no man can tell what they are for or what is beyond ... he glows a moment on the extremest verge.  He is most wonderful in his last half-hidden smile or frown ... by that flash of the moment of parting the one that sees it shall be encouraged or terrified afterward for many years.  The greatest poet does not moralize or make applications of morals ... he knows the soul.  The soul has that measureless pride which consists in never acknowledging any lessons but its own.  But it has sympathy as measureless as its pride and the one balances the other and neither can stretch too far while it stretches in company with the other.  The inmost secrets of art sleep with the twain.  The greatest poet has lain close betwixt both and they are vital in his style and thoughts.

The art of art, the glory of expression and the sunshine of the light of letters is simplicity.  Nothing is better than simplicity ... nothing can make up for excess or for the lack of definiteness.  To carry on the heave of impulse and pierce intellectual depths and give all subjects their articulations are powers neither common nor very uncommon.  But to speak in literature with the perfect rectitude and insouciance of the movements of animals and the unimpeachableness of the sentiment of trees in the woods and grass by the roadside is the flawless triumph of art.  If you have looked on him who has achieved it you have looked on one of the masters of the artists of all nations and times.  You shall not contemplate the flight of the gray gull over the bay or the mettlesome action of the blood horse or the tall leaning of sunflowers on their stalk or the appearance of the sun journeying through heaven or the appearance of the moon afterward with any more satisfaction than you shall contemplate him.  The greatest poet has less a marked style and is more the channel of thoughts and things without increase or diminution and is the free channel of himself.  He swears to his art, I will not be meddlesome,