Man in the garden of God, accepting, as the gift of his Creator, the plenitude of earthly good, combined in his lot Poetry and reality, which in the experience of his descendants are always severed; and yet the first of these is not lost, although it stands aloof. In ten thousand ordinary minds there is an element latent which, in the one in ten thousand, quickens and becomes productive. The musings and the yearnings of millions of souls are so many inarticulate utterances of a dreamlike conception of innocence, love, ease, leafy fragrant bowers, and shining skies, which those who have never found these things in their lot, nevertheless persist in thinking have been wanting in it only through adverse accidents and their evil stars! So long as sorrows, regrets, remorses, broken promises, broken hopes, continue to call forth sighs, and to moisten cheeks with tears—so long as blighted, or wounded, or wasted affections eat as a canker into sensitive hearts, so long as the bereaved, and the friendless, and the homeless, and the lost, continue to think themselves unblessed, though they might have been blessed, then will these many sufferers be dreaming of a lot which can never be theirs, wherein the bright conditions of a lost Paradise should have been represented, if not fully realized.
Refine these yearning beliefs—train them in artistic expression, and then the product is—Poetry; and how elaborate soever this product may be, it has had its rise in what was once as real, as are
