Through flat and unprofitable moments, a poet is waiting for the next consent of his imagination. The bed of every gift, that lately sparkled or thundered as the freshet of the hills sent its surprises down, lies empty, waiting for the master passion to open the sluice when it hears the steps of coming waves. The poet's nature strains against the dumb gates of his body and his mood. With power and longing he hears them open, and is brim full again with the rhythm that collects from the whole face of Nature,--the hillside, the ravine, the drifting cloud, the vapors just arrived from the ocean, the drops that flowers nod with to flavor the stream, the human smiles that colonize both banks of it. All passions, all delights hurry to possess his thought, crowd into the precincts of his person, pain him with the tumult in which they offer him obedience, remind him of his last joy in their companionship, and will not let him go till he ennobles them by bursting into expression. Relief flows down with every perfect word; the congested soul bleeds into the lyric and the canto; the poet's burden becomes light-hearted, and the supreme moment of his travail, when it breaks in showers of his emotion, cools and comforts him; he must die or express himself. All the blood in the earth's arteries is running through his heart; all the stars in the sky are set in his brain's dome. This light and life must be discharged into a word, and the poet restored to health and peace again. Or the following rhapsody about health: