Not, however, that the poet busies himself with the question as to the essential nature of the material world, or inquires whether there can be found in matter any ultimate and permanent element. The analytic scrutiny of appearances is no part of his concern; this he willingly leaves to the physicist and the metaphysician to settle between them. Whether matter be ultimately resolvable into indestructible atoms out of which all visible forms are composed, or whether all that impinges on our senses be not at bottom one only force manifesting itself in infinite change, or whether in the last resort matter may be only “a permanent possibility of sensation,” or whether all force may not be regarded as the direct and immediate action of the Divine Will,—all these are questions with which, as poet, he does not intermeddle, though his knowledge that such questions can be asked may quicken his sense of the mystery of Creation which he contemplates. When poets have ventured to make such abstract questions the subject of their poetry, they have not generally succeeded. The poetic strength of Lucretius is not seen in his expositions, able though they are, of the atomic philosophy, but in his vivid representation of the manifold appearances of Nature, and in his broad and profound sense of the one universal life that pervades them all. The poet is in his proper place, not when he scrutinizes nature as an analyst, but when he unreservedly accepts all her concrete appearances as they come to him. Forms and colors are given him through the eye; sounds as they reach him through the ear; fragrances as wafted to his sense of smell. On this side of analysis there is enough, and more than enough, for him. The outward appearances he feels more intensely, and renders into words more graphically than ordinary men,—no other describes them so to the quick,—yet he does not rest in them, but passes with them inward and brings them into relation with his own being, or rather with the universal heart of man. The ethereal blue of the sky on a fine spring day delights every man, and something of the delight is no doubt due to the mere eye, to the adaptation of the object to the visual organ; but how much more—who shall say?—is due to the endless suggestiveness of the sight, even though of its manifold meaning nothing may shape itself into words. But it is the poet’s privilege not only to describe the outward image, but to draw out some of the many meanings that lie hid in it, and so render them as to win response from his fellow-men. It matters not, therefore, if it be true, that all men can know of Nature is the sensations it produces in himself. Even if this be all, it is enough for the poet. Leaving to others to deal with its physical uses as the feeder and supporter of the body, it is his to note how it exhilarates the animal spirits; how it passes into the imagination and there becomes rich in suggestiveness; how it entwines itself round the affections;