238 THROUGH LIBRARY. WINDOWS 



could, and lo! they were poems, forever im- 

 mortal because torn from the palpitating hearts 

 of genius. 



Nature needs the living genius as her inter- 

 preter, for only the soul of man divinely 

 touched can divine the soul of Nature. She 

 finds the poet most susceptible to her appeals 

 and elects him as her mouthpiece, and ever his 

 trick is to idealize her, personify her and gift 

 her with eloquence of speech. You cannot find 

 what the poet finds in the fields, and woods, un- 

 til you take the poet's heart thither. He sees 

 wondrous things, sees them truthfully because 

 they exist, but adds the indescribable aureola of 

 his own emotional spirit. A tree, a flower, a 

 bird, a cloud, a sunset have no strange and hid- 

 den meanings, no meanings they are not ever 

 ready to impart to any one wisely visioning and 

 interrogating. 



The poet gets the first insight because that is 

 his gift, he is a seer; he is an interpreter, and 

 that is his mission. Interpreters differ, and 

 rightly, because the soul has an infinite gamut 

 of feeling. Milton's Nightingale is not that of 

 Keats; Burns' daisy is not Wordsworth's; Tur- 

 ner does not see what Titian sees; Veronese 

 does not paint as Correggio; Millet paints peas- 

 antry as no other, and Corot creates his light as 



