The greatest poet hardly knows pettiness or triviality. If he
breathes into anything that was before thought small, it dilates
with the grandeur and life of the universe. He is a seer--he is
individual--he is complete in himself--the others are as good as he,
only he sees it, and they do not. He is not one of the chorus--he does
not stop for any regulation--he is the president of regulation. What
the eyesight does to the rest, he does to the rest. Who knows the
curious mystery of the eyesight? The other senses corroborate
themselves, but this is removed from any proof but its own, and
foreruns the identities of the spiritual world. A single glance of it
mocks all the investigations of man, and all the instruments and books
of the earth, and all reasoning. What is marvellous? what is unlikely?
what is impossible or baseless or vague--after you have once just
open'd the space of a peach-pit, and given audience to far and near,
and to the sunset, and had all things enter with electric swiftness,
softly and duly, without confusion or jostling or jam?
The land and sea, the animals, fishes and birds, the sky of heaven
and the orbs, the forests, mountains and rivers, are not small themes
--but folks expect of the poet to indicate more than the beauty and
dignity which always attach to dumb real objects--they expect him
to indicate the path between reality and their souls. Men and
women perceive the beauty well enough--probably as well as he. The
passionate tenacity of hunters, woodmen, early risers, cultivators of
gardens and orchards and fields, the love of healthy women for the
manly form, seafaring persons, drivers of horses, the passion for
light and the open air, all is an old varied sign of the unfailing
perception of beauty, and of a residence of the poetic in out-door
people.
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