Page:The nature and elements of poetry, Stedman, 1892.djvu/53

Rh and to reproduce it. Transcendental thinkers—such as Lord Bacon in his finest vein—recognize this as its office. While Bacon's general Bacon. view of poetry is that all "Feigned History" (as he terms it), prose or verse, may be so classed, he says the use of it "hath been to give some shadow of satisfaction to the mind of man in those points wherein the nature of things doth deny it"; and again, that it is thought to "have some participation of divineness because it doth raise and erect the mind, by submitting the shews of things to the desires of the mind." Sidney's flawless Sidney. "Defense of Poesie" exalts the prophetic gift of the vates above all art and invention. In our day Carlyle clung to the supremacy of inspiration, in art no less than in action. But no one since Plotinus has made it so veritably the golden dome of the temple as our seer of seers, Emerson, in whose belief the artist does not create so much as report. The soul works through him. "Poetry is the perpetual endeavor to express the spirit of the thing." And thus all the Concord group, notably The Concord School. Dr. W. T. Harris, in whose treatises of Dante and other poets the spiritual interpreting