I was not heard: I saw them not.

When musing deeply on the lot

Of life at that sweet time when birds are wooing

All vital things that wake to bring

News of buds and blossoming,

Sudden thy shadow fell on me I shrieked and clasped my hands in ecstasy!

I vow'd that I would dedicate my powers

To thee and thine: have I not kept the vow?

With beating heart and streaming eyes, even now

I call the phantoms of a thousand hours

Each from his voiceless grave: they have in vision'd bowers

Of studious zeal or love's delight

Outwatch'd with me the envious night:

They know that never joy illum'd my brow,

Unlink'd with hope that thou wouldst free,

This world from its dark slavery,

That thou, O awful Loveliness,

Wouldst give whate'er these words cannot express.

Imagination is its soul.* With the passions of mankind- although it may modify them greatly- although it may exalt, or inflame, or purify, or control them- it would require little ingenuity to prove that it has no inevitable, and indeed no necessary co-existence. We have hitherto spoken of poetry in the abstract: we come now to speak of it in its everyday acceptation- that is to say, of the practical result arising from the sentiment we have considered.

* Imagination is, possibly in man, a lesser degree of the creative power in God. What the Deity imagines, is, but was not before. What man imagines, is, but was also. The mind of man cannot imagine what is not. This latter point may be demonstrated.- See Les Premiers Traits de L'Erudition Universelle, par M. Le Baron de Biefield, 1767.

And now it appears evident, that since Poetry, in this new sense, is the practical result, expressed in language, of this Poetic Sentiment in certain individuals, the only proper method of testing the merits of a poem is by measuring its capabilities of exciting the Poetic Sentiments in others.