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[280] is; and Thoreau remarks that there never yet was a definition of it so good but the poet would proceed to disregard it by setting aside all its requisitions. Shelley says that a man cannot say, “ ‘ I will compose poetry.’ The greatest poet even cannot say it, for the mind in creation is as a fading coal, which some invisible influence, like an inconstant wind, awakens to transitory brightness; this power arises from within, like the color of a flower which fades and changes as it is developed, and the conscious portions of our nature are unprophetic either of its approach or its departure.” 1 In a like vein Schiller wrote to K6rner that what impressed him when he sat down to write was usually some single impulse or harmonious tone, and not any clear notion of what he proposed writing. “These observations,” he says, “arise from an Ode to light with which I am now busy. I have as yet no idea what the poem will be, but a presentiment; and yet I can promise beforehand that it will be successful.” 2 We have self-revelations
Boston, New York and Chicago. Houghton, Mifflin and Company, 1903.
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