154 BIRDS AND POETS 
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 crea- 
tive act, and those works that rest upon it make 
demands — perhaps extraordinary ones—upon the 
reader or 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 associa- 
tion 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 concern- 
ing it. To copy here and there a line or a trait is 
no explanation; but to translate nature into an- 
other language—to bridge it to us, to repeat in 
some sort the act of creation itself—is the final 
and crowning triumph of poetic art. 
II 
After the critic has enumerated all the stock quali- 
ties of the poet, as taste, fancy, melody, etc., 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. 
