perhaps unavoidable; but it is on that account the more necessary to guard against the misconception always likely to arise from the original signification of the word, which we can never discard entirely from the mind in using it in a secondary sense.--You do not need to be reminded how completely the history of the poetical art evinces, that these positions, whether expressly acquiesced in or not, have been invariably acted on in the judgments which the world has pronounced in particular cases. [Sidenote: Describing forms by their outsides, is not Poetry.] [Sidenote: They must be shown as exciting changes of Mind.] The inadequacy of a representation of forms by their external attributes to constitute poetical pictures, could be instanced from every bad poem which has ever been written; and the great truth, that the external world is exhibited poetically only by being represented as the exciting cause of mental changes, has been illustrated in no age so singularly as in our own. [Sidenote: Wordsworth declares that all outward objects can do this, and become sentient existences.] The writings of Wordsworth in particular have stretched the principle to the utmost extent which it can possibly sustain; demanding a belief that all external objects are poetical, because all can interest the human mind; establishing the reasonableness of the assumption by the boldest confidence in the strength and delicacy with which the poetical perception can trace the qualities which awaken that interest, and the progress of the feeling itself; and applying the poetical faculty to the transforming of every object of sense into an energetic, and as it were sentient, existence. [Sidenote: Mere wealth of imagery is of little worth.] And attention is especially due to the decision which has always recognized, as the rule of poetical excellence, the operation of some power independent of mere wealth of imagination, ranking this latter quality as one of the lowest merits of poetry. [Sidenote: The greatest poets use the fewest images,] We are apt to forget that those minds whose conceptions have been the most strongly and truly poetical, are by no means those whose poetical ideas have been the most abundant; that an overflow of poetical images has been coincident with an intense perception of their most efficient poetical relations only in a few rare instances; and that it is precisely where the highest elements of the poetical are most active that [91:1]the imagination is usually found to offer the fewest images as the materials on which the poetical faculty should work. [Sidenote: witness Dante, Alfieri.] It is enough to name Dante, or, a still more singular instance, Alfieri. [Sidenote: Their intensity is their secret.] In both cases the poetical influence rests on the intensity of the one simple aspect of grandeur or passion in which a character is presented, and in both that simplicity is unrelieved and undecorated by any fulness of imagery.[91:2]