32 



The poet is not essentially different from common men ; he is only 

 more a man than common men. He perceives more acutely, conceives 

 more vividly, and feels more deeply. Common men have more or less 

 of poetical feeling, so as to he able to enter into and sympathise mth 

 what the poet utters, though they have not enough to find it out and 

 express it for themselves. " Poetry," says Shelley, " lifts the veil from 

 the hidden beauty of the world, and makes familiar objects be as if 

 they were not familiar." Coleridge has well said that "to carry on 

 the feelings of childhood into the powers of manhood ; to combine the 

 child's sense of wonder and novelty with the appearances, which every 

 day for perhaps forty years had rendered familiar ; this is the character 

 and privilege of genius, and one of the marks which distinguish genius 

 from talents. * * * Who has not a thousand times seen 

 snow fall on water? "Who has not watched it with a new feeling, from 

 the time that he has read Burns's comparison of sensual pleasure 

 ' To snow that falls upon a river, 

 A moment white, then gone for ever ! ' " 

 In like manner the everyday phenomena of the tides of the ocean 

 acquire fresh interest from the comparison of Shakspeare: — 

 " There is a tide in the atfairs of men, 



Which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune ; 



Omitted, all the voyage of our life 



Is bound in shallows and in miseries." 

 How poetical is the comparison to a ship in the following passage from 



the Merchant of Venice ! — 



"All things that are, 



Are with more spirit chased than enjoyed. 



How like a youuker, or a prodigal, 



The skarfed hark puts from her native bay, 



Hugg'd and embraced by the strumpet wind ! 



How like a prodigal doth she return, 



With over-weather'd ribs and ragged saUs, 



Lean, rent and beggar'd by the strumpet ^ind ! " 

 "Poetn.'," says Leigh Hunt, "begins where matter of fact or of 

 science ceases to be merely such, and to exhibit a further truth ; that 

 is to say, the connexion it has with the world of emotion, and its power 

 to produce imaginative pleasure. Inquiring of a gardener, for in- 

 stance, what flower it is we see yonder, he answers, ' a lily.' This is 

 matter of fact. The botanist pronounces it to be ' Hexandria !Mono- 

 gyuia.' This is matter of science. It is the 'lady' of the garden, 

 says Spenser ; and here we begin to have a poetical sense of its fair- 

 ness and grace. It is 



' The plant and flower of light,' 

 saj-s Ben Jonson ; and poetry then shows us the beauty of the flower in 

 all its mystery ami splendour. ' 



