Page:The nature and elements of poetry, Stedman, 1892.djvu/232

202 by its own device; just as, in mechanics, the screw-propeller Art has a truth of its own. is more than the equivalent of the fish's flukes or the bird's wing. Our delight in art proceeds from a knowledge that it is not inevitable, but designed; a human, not a natural, creation; the truth of nature's capabilities, seen by man's imagination, captured by the human hand, expressed and illumined when our Creator, intrusting his own wand to us, bids us test its power ourselves.

What is called descriptive poetry never can be The poet inferior to the painter in depicting nature;. very satisfying, since the painter is so much more capable than the poet of transferring the visible effects of nature,—those addressed to the eye. I suppose it is out of the power of one not reared in England, and in that very part of England which lies between Derwentwater and the Wye, to comprehend thoroughly the truth and beauty of Wordsworth's pastoral note and landscape. Neither can a foreigner rightly estimate the American idylists; the New World scenery and atmosphere are so different from the European that they must be seen before their quality can be felt. Aside from this limitation, the poet expresses what but unsurpassed as her subjective interpreter. he finds in nature, to wit, that which answers to his own needs and temper. Her interpretation has been, it may almost be said, a special function of the century now closing. Nature moved Coleridge to eloquence, rhapsody,