into a stage, for which it is our duty to study our parts well, and conduct with propriety and precision,—­so in the autobiography, the fault of his education is, so to speak, its merely artistic completeness.  Nature is hindered, though she prevails at last in making an unusually catholic impression on the boy.  It is the life of a city boy, whose toys are pictures and works of art, whose wonders are the theatre and kingly processions and crownings.  As the youth studied minutely the order and the degrees in the imperial procession, and suffered none of its effect to be lost on him, so the man aimed to secure a rank in society which would satisfy his notion of fitness and respectability.  He was defrauded of much which the savage boy enjoys.  Indeed, he himself has occasion to say in this very autobiography, when at last he escapes into the woods without the gates:  “Thus much is certain, that only the undefinable, wide-expanding feelings of youth and of uncultivated nations are adapted to the sublime, which, whenever it may be excited in us through external objects, since it is either formless, or else moulded into forms which are incomprehensible, must surround us with a grandeur which we find above our reach.”  He further says of himself:  “I had lived among painters from my childhood, and had accustomed myself to look at objects, as they did, with reference to art.”  And this was his practice to the last.  He was even too well-bred to be thoroughly bred.  He says that he had had no intercourse with the lowest class of his towns-boys.  The child should have the advantage of ignorance as well as of knowledge, and is fortunate if he gets his share of neglect and exposure.

     “The laws of Nature break the rules of Art.”

The Man of Genius may at the same time be, indeed is commonly, an Artist, but the two are not to be confounded.  The Man of Genius, referred to mankind, is an originator, an inspired or demonic man, who produces a perfect work in obedience to laws yet unexplored.  The Artist is he who detects and applies the law from observation of the works of Genius, whether of man or nature.  The Artisan is he who merely applies the rules which others have detected.  There has been no man of pure Genius; as there has been none wholly destitute of Genius.

Poetry is the mysticism of mankind.

The expressions of the poet cannot be analyzed; his sentence is one word, whose syllables are words.  There are indeed no words quite worthy to be set to his music.  But what matter if we do not hear the words always, if we hear the music?

Much verse fails of being poetry because it was not written exactly at the right crisis, though it may have been inconceivably near to it.  It is only by a miracle that poetry is written at all.  It is not recoverable thought, but a hue caught from a vaster receding thought.

A poem is one undivided unimpeded expression fallen ripe into literature, and it is undividedly and unimpededly received by those for whom it was matured.