The poet is he who has drunk more deeply at the well of experience than has his fellow men. Many a profound poet never writes a verse, for when a man of temperament is deeply moved he writes a poem within his own heart. It is for some to transcribe their emotions into words whereby their feelings may be communicated from one man to another; but it is for others to be without the gift of verbal expression and the poems must remain within. How many times in life is your soul afire with enthusiasm, drunk with beauty, stricken with sadness, or overflowing with the meaning or portent of experience? At those times you are a poet, whether or not you transcribe the reflection of your heart upon the written page. The man who sings within is a singer whether or not he gives his song verbal utterance. These hours of poetic ecstasy make life a thing to be cherished. The sources of such ecstasy are manifold—the love of man and woman, or parent and children, religious communion with the Spirit, comradeship, work, pursuance of duty, speed, health, beauty, the joy of the builder or artist, attainment to a higher understanding, sadness, hope,—from such springs come the bubbles of the wine of life, heartening the cherished hours. Our greatest poems are those that have never been written—true experience is poetry, and experience is an open door to life. Yet all experience is an arch wherethrough Gleams that untraveled world, whose margin fades For ever and for ever when I move. The poetry found in books is experience, directly or indirectly, through the agency of verbal expression, transferred to the printed page. The great writers of poems are those who have undergone spiritual experiences of greater intensity than those which come within the range of us lesser mortals. In their poems we partake of their life, of their ecstasy in the presence of beauty, of the richness of their imaginings, of the depth of their spiritual natures. You and I, when we hear the wood thrush sing, are moved with the music of the notes, and are possibly carried away into the bosky woods where the richly patterned bird in his evening song pours his heart to Heaven; but when Keats hears the melody of the nightingale, his nature so acutely attuned to the harmony, the message of peace and solitude, is swept away in such an ecstasy of heartfelt longing for that same peace, that same solitude, that his own heart pours forth his song, in words no less musical, in cadences no less rich than the notes of the feathered songster. His experience is preserved for us in "The Ode to a Nightingale" and we may read and derive the same fascination that he felt.