Page:Biographical and critical studies by James Thomson ("B.V.").djvu/295

Rh as one who is speaking in an unknown tongue, or who is raving of fantasies which have no foundation in reality.

Therefore, the accusations of mysticism but ignorantly affirm that he was most intensely and purely a poet. Plato, in the Ion (Shelley's translation) says: "For the authors of those great poems which we admire do not attain to excellence through the rules of any art; but they utter their beautiful melodies of verse in a state of inspiration, and, as it were, possessed by a spirit not their own." And again: "For a poet is, indeed, a thing ethereally light, winged, and sacred; nor can he compose anything worth calling poetry until he becomes inspired, and, as it were, mad For, whilst a man retains any portion of the thing called reason, he is utterly incompetent to produce poetry or to vaticinate." This great truth has been enounced or implied by all true philosophers, though sadly abused by uninspired poetasters, and as obviously obnoxious as the Berkeleyan Idealism to stupid and unavailing sneers. Shelley himself, in that "Defence of Poetry" which is one of the most beautiful prose pieces in the language, and which, in serene elevation of tone and expanse and sublety of thought, is worthy of Plato or Emerson, repeatedly and throughout insists upon it as the essential law of poetic creation.

The only true or inspired poetry is always from within, not from without. The experience contained in it has been spiritually transmuted from lead into gold. It is severely logical, the most trivial of its adornments being subservient to and suggested by