If it be asked, how we know perceptions like these to be true, the answer is, by the fact of their existence--by the consent and delight of poetic readers. And as feeling is the earliest teacher, and perception the only final proof, of things the most demonstrable by science, so the remotest imaginations of the poets may often be found to have the closest connexion with matter of fact; perhaps might always be so, if the subtlety of our perceptions were a match for the causes of them. Consider this image of Ben Jonson’s--of a lily being the flower of light. Light, undecomposed, is white; and as the lily is white, and light is white, and whiteness itself is nothing _but_ light, the two things, so far, are not merely similar, but identical. A poet might add, by an analogy drawn from the connexion of light and colour, that there is a ‘golden dawn’ issuing out of the white lily, in the rich yellow of the stamens. I have no desire to push this similarity farther than it may be worth. Enough has been stated to show that, in poetical as in other analogies, ‘the same feet of Nature’, as Bacon says, may be seen ‘treading in different paths’; and that the most scornful, that is to say, dullest disciple of fact, should be cautious how he betrays the shallowness of his philosophy by discerning no poetry in its depths. But the poet is far from dealing only with these subtle and analogical truths. Truth of every kind belongs to him, provided it can bud into any kind of beauty, or is capable of being illustrated and impressed by the poetic faculty. Nay, the simplest truth is often so beautiful and impressive of itself, that one of the greatest proofs of his genius consists in his leaving it to stand alone, illustrated by nothing but the light of its own tears or smiles, its own wonder, might, or playfulness. Hence the complete effect of many a simple passage in our old English ballads and romances, and of the passionate sincerity in general of the greatest early poets, such as Homer and Chaucer, who flourished before the existence of a ‘literary world’, and were not perplexed by a heap of notions and opinions, or by doubts how emotion ought to be expressed. The greatest of their successors never write equally to the purpose, except when they can dismiss everything from their minds but the like simple truth. In the beautiful poem of _Sir Eger, Sir Graham and Sir Gray-Steel_ (see it in Ellis’s _Specimens_, or Laing’s _Early Metrical Tales_), a knight thinks himself disgraced in the eyes of his mistress:-- Sir Eger said, ‘If it be so, Then wot I well I must forgo Love-liking, and manhood, all clean!’ _The water rush’d out of his een!_ Sir Gray-Steel is killed: Gray-Steel into his death thus thraws[26] He _walters[27] and the grass up draws;_ * * * * * _A little while then lay he still (Friends that him saw, liked full ill) And bled into his armour bright._ [26] throes?