Now out of this very faint and rapid sketch of a psychological theory which would require a volume for its development, we hope to be able to convey some idea, however vague, of the nature of the poetic spirit.
It is certain that the remains of the divine image have not since been alike and equal in all the individuals of the race. It may be asserted, on the contrary, that there are no two human microcosms in which the elements of the confusion introduced into them by the original infidelity exist in the same proportion. Those in whom the intelligence is the quickest to see, and the mind, heart, and soul to love in unison, the image of divine beauty revealed in creation--those, that is, in whom the divine image remains the most pronouncedly--are the truest poets.
When this echo of the soul to the beautiful does not go beyond the physical creation, the inspirations of love express themselves in lyric or idyllic poetry. The poet imitates the divine Creator in reproducing, even creating, images of his lower creation so faithful and suggestive that they who look upon them experience similar sensations and emotions to those provoked within them by the divine creation itself, nay, not unseldom, even profounder ones. He reveals the beautiful in similar images to those in which The Beautiful revealed himself to his creature; he is thus himself a ποιητὴς, or creator, and his work is a ποίησις, or creation. When his forms derive their inspiration only from the inferior creation, they are exclusively some form of idyls or lyrics. But when, soaring above the grosser medium of the merely material universe, and poising himself on wings tremulous with reverent joy at the confines of the invisible, his soul echoes the music of the beautiful issuing from that invisible creation; and that imitative energy which is of its essence, inspired by these reawakening inspirations, calls into being psychical individualities with their precise bodily expression and proper destinies--that is to say, with all the causes and results, ebb and flow, action and reaction, in human affairs, of every volition and energy, he reproduces the highest energy of the divine creative power, he evokes into sensible existence whole multitudes of fresh creatures made in the image of God, and, what is even yet more sublime, he evokes into equally sensible being the particular providence which overrules each and all--the one difference between the two creations being that one is original, the other imitative; one imaginary--that is, _merely_ sensible; the other, not only sensible, but _real_ also, and _essential_. Yet are the accidents of the former produced occasionally with such extraordinary fidelity that they have sometimes, as in the creations of Shakspere, for example, the same effect upon those who become acquainted with them as if they were in truth the latter.