In the best poetry there is vivid picture-making:  reality is made more visible by being presented as a beautiful show.  It is the power to present the beautiful show which constitutes the poet.  To conceive a scene or person with such liveliness and compactness as to be able to transfer the conception to paper with a distinctness and palpitation that shall make the reader behold in it a fresh and buoyant type of the actual—­this implies a subtle, creative life in the mind, this is the test of poetic faculty.  To stand this test there must be an inward sea of thought and sensibility, dipping into which the poet is enabled to hold up his conception or invention all adrip with sparkling freshness.  The poetic mind, with a firm, and at the same time free, easy hold, holds a subject at arm’s length, where it can be turned round in the light; the prosaic mind grasps and hugs what it handles so close that there is no room for play of light or motion.

Contemplating synthetically the highest and choicest and purest, and at the same time actively endeavoring to embody it, the genuine poet has in his best work joy as exalted as the mind can here attain to; and in the reader who can attune himself to the high pitch, he enkindles the same kind of joyful exaltation.  There is current a detestable phrase or definition, which even Coleridge allows himself to countenance, namely, that poetry is something which gives pleasure.  Pleasure!  Do we speak of the pleasure of beholding the sun rise out of the Atlantic or from the top of Mount Washington, or the pleasure of standing beside Niagara, or of reading about the self-sacrifice of Regulus or Winkelried?  Pleasure is a word limited to the animal or to the lighter feelings.  “Let me have the pleasure of taking wine with you.”  A good dinner gives great pleasure to a circle of gourmets.  Even enjoyment, a higher word than pleasure, should, when applied to poetry, be conjoined with some elevating qualification; for all the feelings impart enjoyment through their simple healthy function, and there are people who enjoy a cock-pit, or a bull-fight, or an execution.  But poetry causes that refined, super-sensuous delight which follows the apprehension of any thought, sentiment, act, or scene, which rises towards the best and purest possible in the range of that thought, sentiment, act, or scene.  In the poetical there always is exaltation, a reaching towards perfection, a subtle, blooming spirituality.  The end of poetry is not pleasure,—­this were to speak too grossly,—­but refined enjoyment through emotion.

To him who has the finer sensibility to become aware of its presence, the poetical is everywhere.  The beautiful is a kiss which man gives to Nature, who returns it; to get the kiss from her he must first give it.  Wordsworth says, “Poetry is the breath and fine spirit of all knowledge; it is the impassioned expression which is in the countenance of all science.”  It might be called the aromatic essence of all life.