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Characteristics of Poetical Genius.
"Criticise the works, analyze the talents of L. E. L.! Truly you have chosen a hopeless task?" some pseudo-utilitarian may exclaim. Anatomize the dust of a butterfly's wing—decompose the morning dew-drops sparkling on the opening flower—fetter and analyze the lightning's transitory flash, bring these and similar objects to the test of induction, the crucible of experiment, and then you may try the power of analysis upon L. E. L.'s poetry.
Are you admiring that plumage, delicate as the vesture of some fairy-land bird? How exquisitely articulated is each feather, and how beautiful the arrangement of the whole! that is the dust of the butterfly's wing, each particle of which, you perceive, is a bright particular feather. Do you observe that glorious sun-beam glassing itself in the mirror of the falling shower, thereby painting on the clouds the many-coloured rainbow, which, though frail it appears to you, cannot be produced without two of Nature's grandest elements—light and water? That glance of the lightning's eye from beneath the dark lid of the thunder-cloud, transient though it was, passing as a child's thought, could not have flashed forth without the presence of electricity,—that pervading principle, without which, constituted as you are, you could neither live, move, nor have your being.
Thus the manifestations of the Creative Spirit, and the operations of His laws in the material world, are no less wonderful and minute than the results are beautiful and complete; so likewise, in the universe of mind and the world of poetry, brilliant
