Depth and breadth of nature are implied in the full poetic imagination. The love of the beautiful, wielding a keen intellect, needs furthermore rich material to mold, and only out of the poet's individual resources can this be drawn. To make a high artist, you must have very much of a man. Behind "Paradise Lost" and "Samson Agonistes" is a big Miltonic man. The poet has to put a great deal of himself, and the best of him, into his work; thence, for high poetry, there must be a great deal of high self to put in. He must coin his soul, and have a large soul to coin; the best work cannot be made out of materials gathered by memory and fancy. His stream of thought must flow from springs, not from reservoirs. Hence the universal biographical interest in such men; they have necessarily a rich personality. The passages I have cited are all pictures of outward nature, natural scenes mirrored on the mind, or rather refracted through it, and in the act transfigured, spiritualized; for such scenes, having the fortune to fall on the minds of poets, are reproduced with joyful revelation of their inmost being, as sunbeams are through a crystal prism. Exhibiting material nature spiritualized, well do these passages show the uplifting character of poetic imagination. But this displays a higher, and its highest power when, striking like a thunderbolt into the core of things, it lays bare mysteries of God and of the heart which mere prosaic reason cannot solve or approach, cannot indeed alone even dimly apprehend. I will now quote passages, brief ones, wherein through the poet are opened vast vistas into the shining universe, or is concentrated in single or few lines the life of man's finer nature, as in the diamond are condensed the warmth and splendor that lie latent in acres of fossil carbon. When, in the sixth book of "Paradise Lost," Milton narrates the arrival on the battle-field of the Son,-- "Attended by ten thousand thousand saints," and then adds:-- "Far off his coming shone," in these five short words is a sudden glare of grandeur that dilates the capable mind with light, and, as the sublime always does, with awe. When Ferdinand, in "The Tempest," leaps "with hair up-staring" into the sea, crying,-- "Hell is empty, And all the devils are here," the mind is suddenly filled with an image of the tumult and flaming rage of a thunder-storm at sea, such as words have never elsewhere carried. What a reach in the imaginative stroke! In the first scene of "Faust," the earth-spirit, whom Faust has evoked, concludes the whirling, dazzling, brief, but gigantic sketch of his function with these words, the majesty of which translation cannot entirely subdue:-- "I ply the resounding great loom of old Time, And work at the Godhead's live vesture sublime." How ennobling is the idea the mind harbors of humanity, after taking in these lines from Wordsworth's "Ode on Intimations of Immortality:"--