If he describe
that walk he will surprise us with revelations: we can then and
thereafter see all that he points out; but we needed his vision to
direct our own. And it is one of the incalculable influences of poetry
that each new revelation is an education of the eye and the feelings.
We learn to see and feel Nature in a far clearer and profounder way,
now that we have been taught to look by poets. The incurious
unimpassioned gaze of the Alpine peasant on the scenes which
mysteriously and profoundly affect the cultivated tourist, is the gaze
of one who has never been taught to look. The greater sensibility of
educated Europeans to influences which left even the poetic Greeks
unmoved, is due to the directing vision of successive poets.
The great difficulty which besets us all--Shakspeares and others, but
Shakspeares less than others---is the difficulty of disengaging the
mind from the thraldom of sensation and habit, and escaping from the
pressure of objects immediately present, or of ideas which naturally
emerge, linked together as they are by old associations.
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