To a soundly trained mind there is no surer sign of shallowness and of interior corruption than that habitual predominance of form over formative energy, of splendour of language and imagery over human significance, which has so remarkably distinguished a great deal of the most widely praised poetry of the past eighty years. Much of this poetry has about as much relation to actual or imaginative reality as the transformation scene of a pantomime; and much more--called “descriptive”--has so low a degree of significance and betrays so inhuman an absorption in the merest superficies of nature, that when the writer pretends to deal with those facts and phenomena of humanity which, directly or indirectly, are the main region of every true poet’s song, he has to overcome our sense that he is an habitual trifler before he can gain credit for sincerity, even when he is giving utterance to what may really be a passing strain of true poetic thought and feeling. A poet who is thus constantly occupied with the superficies of nature may probably attain to an accuracy and splendour of analytical description which has its value in its way, and which may, in certain transitory conditions of popular taste, raise him to the highest pinnacle of favour. But such poetry will be judged, in the end, by its human significance; and the writer of it will have the fatal verdict of “heartless” recorded against him--a verdict which even in the time of his favour is implicitly pronounced by the indifference with which his professions of human principle and feeling are received, even by his admirers. The slightest touch of genuine humanity is of more actual and poetic value than all that is not human which the sun shines on. The interest of what is called “descriptive” or “representative” in real poetry and all real art is always human, or, in other words, “imaginative.” A description by Wordsworth, Coleridge, or Burns, a landscape by Crome, Gainsborough, or Constable, is not merely nature, but nature reflected in and giving expression to a state of mind. The state of mind is the true subject, the natural phenomena the terms in which it is uttered; and there has never been a greater critical fallacy than that contained in Mr. Ruskin’s strictures on the “pathetic fallacy.” Nature has no beauty or pathos (using the term in its widest sense) but that with which the mind invests it. Without the imaginative eye it is like a flower in the dark, which is only beautiful as having in it a power of reflecting the colours of the light. The true light of nature is the human eye; and if the light of the human eye is darkness, as it is in those who see nothing but surfaces, how great is that darkness! The saying of Wordsworth concerning the Poet, that You must love him ere to you He will seem worthy of your love,