"Poetry, taken in its widest acceptation, as the power of creating what is beautiful, and representing it to the eye or the ear, is a universal gift of Heaven, being shared to a certain extent even by those whom we call barbarians and savages. Internal excellence is alone decisive, and where this exists we must not allow ourselves to be repelled by the external appearance. Everything must be traced up to the root of human nature: if it has sprung from thence, it has an undoubted worth of its own; but if, without possessing a living germ, it is merely externally attached thereto, it will never thrive nor acquire a proper growth. Many productions which appear at first sight dazzling phenomena in the province of the fine arts, and which as a whole have been honored with the appellation of works of a golden age, resemble the mimic gardens of children: impatient to witness the work of their hands, they break off here and there branches and flowers, and plant them in the earth; everything at first assumes a noble appearance: the childish gardener struts proudly up and down among his showy beds, till the rootless plants begin to droop, and hang their withered leaves and blossoms, and nothing soon remains but the bare twigs, while the dark forest, on which no art or care was ever bestowed, and which towered up toward heaven long before human remembrance, bears every blast unshaken, and fills the solitary beholder with religious awe." In his "Poets and Problems," George Willis Cooke fitly portrays the poet's function (pp. 42, 32, and 44):-- "The poet must be either a teacher or an artist; or, what is better, he may be both in one. Therefore, he can never stop at form or at what delights and charms merely. He must go on to the expression of something of deep and real abidingness of thought and beauty. This comes at last to be the real thing for which he works, which he seeks to bring into expression with such power and grandeur in it as he can produce, and which he wills to send forth for the sake of this higher impression on the world." "Man has within him a need for the food which does not perish; he always is finding anew that he cannot live by bread alone. His mind will crave truth, his heart love, somewhat to satisfy the inward needs of life. A heavenly homesickness will draw him away from the material to those æsthetic and spiritual realities which are at the source of the truest poetry. Whenever these wants find fit interpretation, the poet and the poetic method of expression appear and give to them outward forms of beauty. Consequently the poet is 'One in whom persuasion and belief Have ripened into faith, and faith become A passionate intuition.'