XIII.

Teach us, sprite* or bird,

What sweet thoughts are thine:

I have never heard

Praise of love or wine

That panted forth a flood of rapture so divine.

XIV.

Chorus hymeneal,

Or triumphal chant,

Matched with thine would be all

But an empty vaunt

A thing wherein we feel there is some hidden want.

XV.

What objects are the fountains

Of thy happy strain?

What fields or waves or mountains?

What shapes of sky or plain?

What love of thine own kind? what ignorance of pain?

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LITERARY ANALYSIS.-61-65. What word in stanza xiii. belongs exclusive

ly to the diction of poetry?

Why is this form here used by the author? 63. Praise of love, etc. From the fact that the "praise of love or wine" has been the theme of much of the most rapturous utterances of the poets, Shelley, merging the generic in the specific, employs this expression to typify impassioned poetry in general.

65. panted. From what is the image drawn?

66. Chorus hymeneal. Explain.

68. with thine. With what?

70. Observe with what accentuated expression this line reiterates the idea foreshadowed in the words "an empty vaunt."

71-75. What... pain. What effect is gained by the use of the interrogative form?

71. fountains, etc. What is the figure of speech? (See Def. 20.)

73-75. What fields... plain. Enumerate the particular objects suggested as the possible sources of the bird's "happy strain."

XVI.

With thy clear, keen joyance
Languor cannot be:
Shadow of annoyance

Never came near thee:

Thou lovest; but ne'er knew love's sad satiety.

XVII.

Waking or asleep,

Thou of death must deem

Things more true and deep

Than we mortals dream,

Or how could thy notes flow in such a crystal stream?

XVIII.

We look before and after,

And pine for what is not:

Our sincerest laughter

With some pain is fraught;

Our sweetest songs are those that tell of saddest thought.

XIX.

Yet if we could scorn

Hate and pride and fear;

If we were things born

Not to shed a tear,

I know not how thy joy we ever should come near.

LITERARY ANALYSIS.-76-80. In stanza xvi., what word belongs to the diction of poetry?-What impressive antithesis in this stanza?

82-85. Thou of death, etc. What is the figure of speech? (See Def. 22.)Note the fine cadence in the last line of the stanza.-Explain the words "crystal stream."

85

86-90. What are the only (two) words not of Anglo-Saxon origin in this stanza? How does the poet express the thought that man is a creature of hope and memory?-What fine contrast is presented in the last line of this stanza? By what device of alliteration is the antithesis aided?

91-95. Yet... near. The idea in this stanza may be thus expressed in prose: Even if we could divest ourselves of earthly passions, we should come short of the beatitude with which nature has gifted that "blithe spirit," the subject of the poem.

90

95

XX.

Better than all measures

Of delightful sound,

Better than all treasures

That in books are found,

Thy skill to poet were, thou scorner of the ground!

XXI.

Teach me half the gladness

That thy brain must know,

Such harmonious madness

From my lips would flow,

The world should listen then, as I am listening now.

100

105

II.-DEFENCE OF POETRY.

1. The functions of the poetical faculty are twofold: by one it creates new materials of knowledge and power and pleasure; by the other it engenders in the mind a desire to reproduce and arrange them according to a certain rhythm and order which may be called the beautiful and the good. The cultivation of poetry 5 is never more to be desired than at periods when, from an excess of the selfish and calculating principle, the accumulation of the materials of external life exceed the quantity of the power of assimilating them to the internal laws of human nature. The body has then become too unwieldy for that which animates it.

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2. Poetry is indeed something divine. It is at once the centre and circumference of knowledge; it is that which comprehends all science, and that to which all science must be referred. It is at the same time the root and blossom of all other systems of thought; it is that from which all spring, and that which adorns 15

LITERARY ANALYSIS. 96-100. Better... ground. Transpose stanza xx. into the prose order.-By what poetic appellation does the poet designate the skylark?

101-105. In this raptuous flight of the imagination the poet soars into the very heaven of his invention.

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all; and that which, if blighted, denies the fruit and the seed, and withholds from the barren world the nourishment and the succession of the scions of the tree of life. It is the perfect and consummate surface and bloom of all things; it is as the odor and the color of the rose to the texture of the elements which com- 20 pose it, as the form and splendor of unfaded beauty to the secrets of anatomy and corruption. What were virtue, love, patriotism, friendship; what were the scenery of this beautiful universe which we inhabit; what were our consolations on this side of the grave, and what were our aspirations beyond it, if poetry did not as- 25 cend to bring light and fire from those eternal regions where the owl-winged faculty of calculation dare not ever soar? 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 color of a flower, which fades and changes as it is developed, and the conscious portions of our natures are unprophetic either of its approach of its departure. 35 Could this influence be durable in its original purity and force, it is impossible to predict the greatness of the results; but when composition begins, inspiration is already on the decline, and the most glorious poetry that has ever been communicated to the world is probably a feeble shadow of the original conceptions of 4o the poet. I appeal to the greatest poets of the present day, whether it is not an error to assert that the finest passages of poetry are produced by labor and study. The toil and the delay recommended by critics can be justly interpreted to mean no more than a careful observation of the inspired moments, and an artificial connection of the spaces between their suggestions by the intermixture of conventional expressions-a necessity only imposed by the limitedness of the poetical faculty itself; for Milton conceived the Paradise Lost as a whole before he executed it in portions. We have his own authority also for the Muse having "dictated" to him the "unpremeditated song." And let this be an answer to those who would allege the fifty-six various readings of the first line of the Orlando Furioso. Compositions so produced are to poetry what mosaic is to painting. This instinct

45

and intuition of the poetical faculty is still more observable in the 55 plastic and pictorial arts. A great statue or picture grows under the power of the artist as a child in the mother's womb; and the very mind which directs the hands in formation is incapable of accounting to itself for the origin, the gradations, or the media of the process.

60

3. 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 be- 65 yond 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 coming calm erases, and 70 whose traces remain only, as on the wrinkled sand which paves it. These and corresponding conditions of being are experienced principally by those of the most delicate sensibility and the most enlarged imagination; and the state of mind produced by them is at war with every base desire. The enthusiasm of virtue, love, 75 patriotism, and friendship is essentially linked with such emotions; and whilst they last, self appears as what it is, an atom to a universe. Poets are not only subject to these experiences as spirits of the most refined organization, but they can color all that they combine with the evanescent hues of this ethereal 80 world. A word, a trait, in the representation of a scene or a passion will touch the enchanted chord, and reanimate, in those who have ever experienced these emotions, the sleeping, the cold, the buried image of the past. Poetry thus makes immortal all that is best and most beautiful in the world; it arrests the vanishing 85 apparitions which haunt the interlunations of life, and, veiling them, or in language or in form, sends them forth among mankind, bearing sweet news of kindred joy to those with whom their sisters abide-abide, because there is no portal of expression from the caverns of the spirit which they inhabit into the universe of things. Poetry redeems from decay the visitations of the divinity in man.