That, my dear Talboys, is a magnanimous and a capacious way of inquiry. But how can any man write about a power who has not a full sympathy with it? I have no doubt that Davy, when he wielded Galvanism to make wonderful and beautiful revelations of veiled things, deeply and largely sympathised with Galvanism. You would think it easier to sympathise with Imagination, and yet to Stewart it seems almost more difficult. Go on.
How has Nature dealt with her mighty and perilous power--Love. Look at it, where it is raised to its despotism--when a man loves a woman, and that woman that man. It is a power to unhinge a world. Lo! in proof "an old song"--the Iliad!
'Trojanas ut opes et lamentabile regnum Eruerint Danai!'
Has Nature feared, therefore, to use it? She builds the world with it. And look how she proceeds. To these two--the Lovers as they are called--the Universe is _in_ these two--to each in the other. The rest of the Universe is shut out from their view, or more wonderfully comprehended in their view--seen to each through and relatively to the other--seen transformed in the magical mirror of their love. Can you expect anything less than that they should go by different doors, or by the same door, into Bedlam? Lo! they have become a Father and a Mother! They have returned into the real world--into a world yet dearer than Dreamland! The world in which their children shall grow up into men and women. Sedate, vigilant, circumspect, sedulous, industrious, wise, just--Pater-familias and Mater-familias. So Nature lets down from an Unreal which she has chosen, and knows how to use.
The ground of the Poet, my dear Talboys, is an extraordinary dotation of sensibility--of course, ten thousand dangers. Life is exuberant in him--and if the world lies at all wide about him, the joy of the great and the beautiful. The dearest of all interests to every rational soul is her own coming destiny. The Poet, quick and keen above all men in self-reference, must, among his contemplations and creations, be full of contemplating and creating his own future, and must pour over it all his power of joy, rosy and golden hopes. And that vision, framed with all his power of the Ideal, must needs be something exceedingly different from that which this bare, and blank, and hard earth of reality has to bestow. What follows? A severe, and perhaps an unprepared trial. The self-protection demanded of him is a morally-guarded heart and life. The protection provided for him is--his Art. The visions--the Ideal--the Great and the Fair, which he cannot incorporate in his own straitened existence--the ambitions, at large, of his imagination he localises--colonises--imparadises--in his works. He has two lives; the life of his daily steps upon the hard and bare, or the green, and elastic, and sweet-smelling earth, and the life of his books, papers, and poetical, studious reveries--art-intending, intellectual ecstasies.