because they are something else first.  Homer chose for his groundwork War, clinching, tearing, tugging war; in Dante, it is Hell; in Milton, Satan and the Fall; in Shakespeare, it is the fierce Feudal world, with its towering and kingly personalities; in Byron, it is Revolt and diabolic passion.  When we get to Tennyson, the lion is a good deal tamed, but he is still there in the shape of the proud, haughty, and manly Norman, and in many forms yet stimulates the mind.

The perception of cosmical beauty comes by a vital original process.  It is in some measure a creative act, and those works that rest upon it make demands—­perhaps extraordinary ones—­upon the reader or the beholder.  We regard mere surface glitter, or mere verbal sweetness, in a mood entirely passive, and with a pleasure entirely profitless.  The beauty of excellent stage scenery seems much more obvious and easy of apprehension than the beauty of trees and hills themselves, inasmuch as the act of association in the mind is much easier and cheaper than the act of original perception.

Only the greatest works in any department afford any explanation of this wonder we call nature, or aid the mind in arriving at correct notions concerning it.  To copy here and there a line or a trait is no explanation; but to translate nature into another language—­to bridge it to us, to repeat in some sort the act of creation itself—­ is the crowning triumph of poetic art.

II

After the critic has enumerated all the stock qualities of the poet, as taste, fancy, melody, it remains to be said that unless there is something in him that is living identity, something analogous to the growing, pushing, reproducing forces of nature, all the rest in the end pass for but little.

This is perhaps what the German critic, Lessing, really means by action, for true poems are more like deeds, expressive of something behind, more like acts of heroism or devotion, or like personal character, than like thoughts or intellections.

All the master poets have in their work an interior, chemical, assimilative property, a sort of gastric juice which dissolves thought and form, and holds in vital fusion religions, times, races, and the theory of their own construction, naming up with electric and defiant power,—­power without any admixture of resisting form, as in a living organism.

There are in nature two types or forms, the cell and the crystal.  One means the organic, the other the inorganic; one means growth, development, life; the other means reaction, solidification, rest.  The hint and model of all creative works is the cell; critical, reflective, and philosophical works are nearer akin to the crystal; while there is much good literature that is neither the one nor the other distinctively, but which in a measure touches and includes both.  But crystallic beauty or cut and polished gems of thought,