poetry it is tradition more than invention helps the poet to a good fable the beauty of poetry may be felt in the greater delight which a verse gives in happy quotation than in the poem it is a curious proof of our conviction that the artist does not feel himself to be the parent of his work and is as much surprised at the effect as we that we are so unwilling to our best sense of any work of art to the author the very highest praise we can attribute to any writer painter is that he actually possessed the thought or feeling with which he has inspired us we hesitate at doing so great an honor as to think that he intended by his the sense we to it we grudge to the wise human his to him even of whom we can believe everything we think indebted to and to for the wisdom they detect in his hamlet and especially have we this infirmity of faith in contemporary genius we fear that and did not foresee and design all the effect they produce on us our arts are happy we are like the on the lake whose melody is sweeter than he knows or like a traveller surprised by a mountain echo whose trivial word returns to him in romantic in view of these facts i say that the power of nature over the human will in all works of even the fine arts in all that respects their material and external circumstances nature the best part of the picture the best part of the statue the best part of the house and speaks the best part of the for all the advantages to which i have are such as the artist did not produce he relied on their aid he put himself in the way to receive aid from some of them but he saw that his planting and his watering waited for the sunlight of nature or was vain thoughts on art let us proceed to the consideration of the great law stated in the beginning of this essay as it affects the purely spiritual part of a work of art as in useful art so far as it is useful the work must be strictly to the laws of nature so as to become a sort of and in no wise a contradiction of nature so in art that aims at beauty as an end must the parts be to ideal nature and everything individual abstracted so that it shall be the production of the universal soul the artist who is to produce a work which is to be admired not by his friends or his or his but by all men and which is to be more beautiful to the eye in proportion to its culture must himself and be a man of no party and no manner and no age but one through whom the soul of all men as the common air through his lungs he must work in the spirit in which we conceive a prophet to speak or an angel of the lord to act that is he is not to speak his own words or do his own works or think his own thoughts but he is to be an organ through which the universal mind acts in speaking of the useful arts i pointed to the fact that we do not dig or grind or by our muscular strength but by bringing the weight of the planet to bear on the axe or bar precisely to this in the fine arts is the manner of our intellectual work we aim to hinder our individuality from acting so much as we can aside our our prejudice and will and bring the of reason upon the subject before us so perfect is the work the wonders of are things which he saw whilst he stood aside and then returned to record them the poet aims at getting observations without aim to subject to thought things seen without voluntary thought in eloquence the great triumphs of the art are when the orator is lifted above himself when he makes himself the mere tongue of the occasion and the hour and says what cannot but be said hence the french phrase to describe the self surrender of the orator not his will but the principle on which he is the great and crisis of events thunder in the ear of the crowd thoughts on art in poetry where every word is free every word is necessary good poetry could not have been otherwise written than it is the first time you hear it it sounds rather as if copied out of some invisible in the eternal mind than as if composed by the poet the feeling of all great poets has accorded with this they found the verse not made it the muse brought it to them in did ever any body call the a fancy piece or say of the how it might be made differ ent a of art has in the mind a fixed place in the chain of being as much as a plant or a crystal the whole language of men especially of artists in reference to this subject points at the belief that every wc k of art in proportion to its excellence of the precision of fate no room was there for choice no play for fancy for the moment or in the successive moments when that form was seen the iron of reason were which ordinarily are heavy with slumber that the individual mind became for the moment the vent of the mind of humanity there is but one reason the mind that made the world is not one mind but the mind every man is an to the same and to all of the same and every work of art is a more or less pure of the same therefore we 