It is ever present to the true artist, in his attempt to report nature, that every object as it stands in the circuit of cause and effect has a history which involves its surroundings, and that the depth of the interest which it awakens in us is in proportion as its integrity in this respect is preserved. In nature we are prepared for any opulence of color or of vegetation, or freak of form, or display of any kind, because of the preponderance of the common, ever-present feature of the earth. The foil is always at hand. In like manner in the master poems we are never surfeited with mere beauty. Woe to any artist who disengages Beauty from the wide background of rudeness, darkness, and strength,--and disengages her from absolute nature! The mild and beneficent aspects of nature,--what gulfs and abysses of power underlie them! The great shaggy, barbaric earth,--yet the summing-up, the plenum, of all we know or can know of beauty! So the orbic poems of the world have a foundation as of the earth itself, and are beautiful because they are something else first. Homer chose for his groundwork War, clinching, tearing, tugging war; in Dante, it is Hell; in Milton, Satan and the Fall; in Shakespeare, it is the fierce Feudal world, with its towering and kingly personalities; in Byron, it is Revolt and diabolic passion. When we get to Tennyson, the lion is a good deal tamed, but he is still there in the shape of the proud, haughty, and manly Norman, and in many forms yet stimulates the mind. The perception of cosmical beauty comes by a vital original process. It is in some measure a creative act, and those works that rest upon it make demands--perhaps extraordinary ones--upon the reader or the beholder. We regard mere surface glitter, or mere verbal sweetness, in a mood entirely passive, and with a pleasure entirely profitless. The beauty of excellent stage scenery seems much more obvious and easy of apprehension than the beauty of trees and hills themselves, inasmuch as the act of association in the mind is much easier and cheaper than the act of original perception. Only the greatest works in any department afford any explanation of this wonder we call nature, or aid the mind in arriving at correct notions concerning it. To copy here and there a line or a trait is no explanation; but to translate nature into another language--to bridge it to us, to repeat in some sort the act of creation itself--is the crowning triumph of poetic art. II After the critic has enumerated all the stock qualities of the poet, as taste, fancy, melody, it remains to be said that unless there is something in him that is _living identity,_ something analogous to the growing, pushing, reproducing forces of nature, all the rest in the end pass for but little.