Having bene in all ages, and even amongst the most barbarous, always of singular accounpt and honour, and being indede so worthy and commendable an arte; or rather no arte, but a divine gift and heavenly instinct not to bee gotten by laboure and learning, but adorned with both; and poured into the witte by a certain Ἐνθουσιασμός and cellestial inspiration.

  Nature never set forth the earth in so rich tapistry, as divers Poets have done, neither with pleasant rivers, fruitful trees, sweet smelling flowers: nor whatsoever els may make the too much loved earth more lovely. Her world is brasen, the Poets only deliver a golden.

  It was ever thought to have some participation of divineness, because it doth raise and erect the mind, by submitting the shews of things to the desires of the mind.

  If he have a poetic vein, ’tis to me the strangest thing in the world that the father should desire or suffer it to be cherished or improved. Methinks the parents should labour to have it stifled and suppressed as much as may be; and I know not what reason a father can have to wish his son a poet, who does not desire to have him bid defiance to all other callings and business; which is not yet the worst of the case; for if he proves a successful rhymer, and gets once the reputation of a wit, I desire it may be considered what company and places he is like to spend his time in,—nay, and estate too…. Poetry and gaming, which usually go together, are alike in this too, that they seldom bring any advantage but to those who have nothing else to live on…. If therefore you would not have your son the fiddle to every jovial company, without whom the sparks could not relish their wine nor know how to pass an afternoon idly; if you would not have him to waste his time and estates to divert others, and contemn the dirty acres left him by his ancestors,—I do not think you will much care he should be a poet, or that his schoolmaster should enter him in versifying.

  Rhymes are difficult things—they are stubborn things, sir.

  The essence of poetry is invention; such invention as, by producing something unexpected, surprises and delights.

  The poet must be alike polished by an intercourse with the world as with the studies of taste; one to whom labour is negligence, refinement a science, and art a nature.

  Poetry is the blossom and the fragrance of all human knowledge, human thoughts, human passions, emotions, language.

  Poetry is found to have a few stronger conceptions, by which it would affect or overwhelm the mind, than those in which it presents the moving and speaking image of the departed dead to the senses of the living.

  Poetry is not like reasoning, a power to be exerted according to the determination of the will. A man cannot say, “I will compose poetry.” The greatest poet even cannot say it; for the mind in creation is as a fading coal, which some invisible influence, like an inconstant wind, awakens to transitory brightness; this power arises from within, like the colour of a flower which fades and changes as it is developed, and the conscious portions of our nature are unprophetic either of its approach or its departure…. Poetry is the record of the best and happiest moments of the happiest and best minds. We are aware of evanescent visitations of thought and feeling, sometimes associated with place or person, sometimes regarding our own mind alone, and always arising unforeseen and departing unbidden, but elevating and delightful beyond all expression: so that even in the desire and the regret they leave, there cannot but be pleasure, participating as it does in the nature of its object. It is, as it were, the interpenetration of a diviner nature through our own; but its footsteps are like those of a wind over the sea, which the morning calm erases, and whose traces remain only, as on the wrinkled sand which paves it.

  Poetry produces an illusion on the eye of the mind, as a magic lantern produces an illusion on the eye of the body. And, as a magic lantern acts best in a dark room, poetry effects its purpose most completely in a dark age. As the light of knowledge breaks in upon its exhibitions, as the outlines of certainty become more and more definite, and the shades of probability more and more distinct, the hues and lineaments of the phantoms which it calls up grow fainter and fainter. We cannot unite the incompatible advantages of reality and deception, the clear discernment of truth and the exquisite enjoyment of fiction.

  The poet, we cannot but think, can never have far to seek for a subject: the elements of his art are in him and around him on every hand; for him the ideal world is not remote from the actual, but under it and within it; nay, he is a poet, precisely because he can discern it there. Wherever there is a sky above him, and a world around him, the poet is in his place, for here too is man’s existence, with its definite longings and small acquirings; its ever-thwarted, ever-renewed endeavors; its unspeakable aspirations, its fears and hopes that wander through eternity; and all the mystery of brightness and of gloom that it was ever made of, in any age or climate, since man first began to live. Is there not the fifth act of a tragedy in every death-bed, though it were a peasant’s and a bed of heath? And are wooings and weddings obsolete, that there can be comedy no longer? Or are men suddenly grown wise, that Laughter must no longer shake his sides, but be cheated of his farce? Man’s life and nature is as it was, and as it will ever be. But the poet must have an eye to read these things, and a heart to understand them, or they come and pass away before him in vain. He is a vates, a seer; a gift of vision that has been given him. Has life no meanings for him which another cannot equally decipher? Then he is no poet, and Delphi itself will not make him one.

  Poetry is the breath of beauty, flowing around the spiritual world, as the winds that wake up the flowers do about the material.

  All that is best in the great poets of all countries is not what is national in them, but what is universal.

  One more royal trait properly belongs to the poet. I mean his cheerfulness, without which no man can be a poet,—for beauty is his aim. He loves virtue, not for its obligation, but for its grace; he delights in the world, in man, in woman, for the lovely light that sparkles from them. Beauty, the spirit of joy and hilarity, he sheds over the universe.

  There are few delights in any life so high and rare as the subtle and strong delight of sovereign art and poetry; there are none more pure and more sublime. To have read the greatest works of any great poet, to have beheld or heard the greatest works of any great painter or musician, is a possession added to the best things of life.

  A Poem consists of all the purest and most beautiful elements in the poet’s nature, crystallised into the aptest and most exquisite language, and adorned with all the outer embellishment of musical cadence or dainty rhyme. Hence it presents us with the highest and noblest product of the æsthetic faculty, embracing as it does in their ideal forms the separate beauties of all its sister arts. Whatever loveliness in face or feature, in hill or stream or ocean, the painter can place before us on his breathing canvas, that loveliness the poet can body forth in his verse, with the superadded touches of his vivid imagination. Whatever glorious floods of sound the singer can pour out from his ever-welling fountain of liquid treble and thundering bass, that glory the poet can reproduce for us in his graphic delineation of all things seen or heard. Even more than this the poet can do. For while painting can only portray for us the forms and colours of the human face or of external nature, with at best some pregnant suggestion of the passions and emotions at work within it—while music can only play upon our inner cords by dim hints and half-comprehended touches, “telling us of things we have not seen, of things we shall not see”—the supreme art of all can utter in clear and definite language every feeling, external or internal, which makes up the sum of human life.