of the poetical faculty itself; for Milton conceived the “Paradise Lost” as a whole before he executed it in portions.  We have his own authority also for the muse having “dictated” to him the “unpremeditated song.”  And let this be an answer to those who would allege the fifty-six various readings of the first line of the “Orlando Furioso.”  Compositions so produced are to poetry what mosaic is to painting.  This instinct and intuition of the poetical faculty is still more observable in the plastic and pictorial arts; a great statue or picture grows under the power of the artist as a child in the mother’s womb; and the very mind which directs the hands in formation is incapable of accounting to itself for the origin, the gradations, or the media of the process.

“Poetry is the record of the best and happiest moments of the happiest and best minds.  We are aware of evanescent visitations of thought and feeling sometimes associated with place or person, sometimes regarding our own mind alone, and always arising unforeseen and departing unbidden, but elevating and delightful beyond all expression:  so that even in the desire and the regret they leave, there cannot but be pleasure, participating as it does in the nature of its object.  It is as it were the interpenetration of a diviner nature through our own; but its footsteps are like those of a wind over the sea, which the coming calm erases, and whose traces remain only, as on the wrinkled sand which paves it.  These and corresponding conditions of being are experienced principally by those of the most delicate sensibility and the most enlarged imagination; and the state of mind produced by them is at war with every base desire.  The enthusiasm of virtue, love, patriotism, and friendship, is essentially linked with such emotions; and whilst they last, self appears as what it is, an atom to a universe.  Poets are not only subject to these experiences as spirits of the most refined organization, but they can colour all that they combine with the evanescent hues of this ethereal world; a word, a trait in the representation of a scene or a passion, will touch the enchanted chord, and reanimate, in those who have ever experienced these emotions, the sleeping, the cold, the buried image of the past.  Poetry thus makes immortal all that is best and most beautiful in the world; it arrests the vanishing apparitions which haunt the interlunations of life, and veiling them, or in language or in form, sends them forth among mankind, bearing sweet news of kindred joy to those with whom their sisters abide—­abide, because there is no portal of expression from the caverns of the spirit which they inhabit into the universe of things.  Poetry redeems from decay the visitations of the divinity in man.”