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332 CRITICAL STUDIES and study. . . . This instinct and intuition of the poetical faculty is still more observable in the plastic and pictorial arts ; a great statue or picture grows under the power of the artist, as a child in the mother's womb ; and the very mind which directs the hand in formation is incapable of accounting to itself for the origin, the gradations, or the media of the process. . . . " It is as it were the interpenetration of a diviner nature through our own. . . . Poetry redeems from decay the visitations of the divinity in man, ... " Poets are the hierophants of an unapprehended inspiration ; the mirrors of gigantic shadows which futurity casts upon the present ; the words which express what they understand not ; the trumpets which sing to battle, and feel not what they inspire ; the influence which is moved not, but moves. Poets are the un- acknowledged legislators of the world." So clear and perfect is the unequalled lyrist's response to the ideal philosopher, athwart the abyss of two thousand years. Ill Thus far we have not found Dr. Wilkinson's process so essentially different from that of the greatest of poets as it appeared to him. We now reach the point where he diverges from the broad high-road leading to the Temple of Fame, and wanders in search of some loftier goal (which may prove but a castle in the air or Fata Morgana^ by narrow and difficult and seldom-trodden ways. This volume "was given just as the reader reads it; with no hesitation; without the correction of one word from beginning to end. . . . The longest pieces in the volume occupied from thirty to forty-five minutes. [With the exception of "The Second Vol uspa," specified in a note, which adds,