Let me people at least, with my fancies, the plains and the rocks,
Dream the life I am never to mix with, and image the show
Of mankind as they live in those fashions I hardly shall know."
All this is natural enough, we say, in a mere boy,—but he will outgrow it. But now and then some one does not outgrow it. He has become a man, and yet in his mind fancies are still rife. They throng upon him and crave expression. The things he sees, the people he meets, are all symbols to him, just as the one eagle which "wheeled slow as in sleep" was to the shepherd lad the symbol of a great unknown world. That which he sees of the actual world seems still to him only a strip "'twixt the hill and the sky,"—all the rest he imagines. He fills it with vivid color and absorbing life. He peoples it with his own thoughts.
We call such a person a poet; and if he is a very good poet, we call him a genius; and, in order to do him honor, we pretend that we cannot understand him, and we employ people to explain him to us. We treat his works as alcohol is treated in the arts. It is, as they say, "denaturized," that is, something is put into it that people don't like, so that they will not drink it "on the sly!"
Yet all the time the plain fact is that the poet is simply a person who is still in possession of all his early qualities. Wordsworth gave away the secret. He is a boy who keeps on growing. He is
One whose heart the holy forms
Of young imagination have kept pure.
Where others see a finished world, he sees all things as manifestations of a free power.
Even in their fixed and steady lineaments