The poet, under whatever name, always stands for the same thing—­imagination.  And imagination in its highest form gives him the power, as it were, of assuming the consciousness of whatever he speaks about, whether man or beast, or rock or tree, fit is the ring of Canace, which whoso has on understands the language of all created things.  And as regards expression, it seems to enable the poet to condense the whole of himself into a single word.  Therefore, when a great poet has said a thing, it is finally and utterly expressed, and has as many meanings as there are men who read his verse.  A great poet is something more than an interpreter between man and nature; he is also an interpreter between man and his own nature.  It is he who gives us those key-words, the possession of which makes us masters of all the unsuspected treasure-caverns of thought, and feeling, and beauty which open under the dusty path of our daily life.

And it is not merely a dry lexicon that he compiles,—­a thing which enables us to translate from one dead dialect into another as dead,—­but all his verse is instinct with music, and his words open windows on every side to pictures of scenery and life.  The difference between the dry fact and the poem is as great as that between reading the shipping news and seeing the actual coming and going of the crowd of stately ships,—­“the city on the inconstant billows dancing,”—­as there is between ten minutes of happiness and ten minutes by the clock.  Everybody remembers the story of the little Montague who was stolen and sold to the chimney-sweep:  how he could dimly remember lying in a beautiful chamber; how he carried with him in all his drudgery the vision of a fair, sad mother’s face that sought him everywhere in vain; how he threw himself one day, all sooty as he was from his toil, on a rich bed and fell asleep, and how a kind person woke him, questioned him, pieced together his broken recollections for him, and so at last made the visions of the beautiful chamber and the fair, sad countenance real to him again.  It seems to me that the offices that the poet does for us are typified in this nursery-tale.  We all of us have our vague reminiscences of the stately home of our childhood,—­for we are all of us poets and geniuses in our youth, while earth is all new to us, and the chalice of every buttercup is brimming with the wine of poesy,—­and we all remember the beautiful, motherly countenance which nature bent over us there.  But somehow we all get stolen away thence; life becomes to us a sooty taskmaster, and we crawl through dark passages without end—­till suddenly the word of some poet redeems us, makes us know who we are, and of helpless orphans makes us the heir to a great estate.  It is to our true relations with the two great worlds of outward and inward nature that the poet reintroduces us.