Let thy love in kisses rain
    On my lips and eyelids pale. My cheek is cold and white, alas! My heart beats loud and fast:
O, press it close to shine again,
    Where it will break at last. Very few perhaps are familiar with these lines—yet no less a poet
      than Shelley is their author. Their warm, yet delicate and ethereal
      imagination will be appreciated by all, but by none so thoroughly as by
      him who has himself arisen from sweet dreams of one beloved to bathe in
      the aromatic air of a southern midsummer night. One of the finest poems by Willis—the very best in my opinion which
      he has ever written—has no doubt, through this same defect of undue
      brevity, been kept back from its proper position, not less in the

     The shadows lay along Broadway,
         ’Twas near the twilight-tide—
     And slowly there a lady fair
         Was walking in her pride. Alone walk’d she; but, viewlessly,
         Walk’d spirits at her side. Peace charm’d the street beneath her feet,
         And Honor charm’d the air;
     And all astir looked kind on her,
         And called her good as fair—
     For all God ever gave to her
         She kept with chary care. She kept with care her beauties rare
         From lovers warm and true—
     For heart was cold to all but gold,
         And the rich came not to won,
     But honor’d well her charms to sell. If priests the selling do. Now walking there was one more fair—
         A slight girl, lily-pale;
     And she had unseen company
         To make the spirit quail—
     ’Twixt Want and Scorn she walk’d forlorn,
         And nothing could avail. No mercy now can clear her brow
         From this world’s peace to pray
     For as love’s wild prayer dissolved in air,
         Her woman’s heart gave way!—
     But the sin forgiven by Christ in Heaven
         By man is cursed alway! In this composition we find it difficult to recognize the Willis who has
      written so many mere “verses of society.” The lines are not only richly
      ideal, but full of energy, while they breathe an earnestness, an evident
      sincerity of sentiment, for which we look in vain throughout all the other
      works of this author. While the epic mania, while the idea that to merit in poetry prolixity is
      indispensable, has for some years past been gradually dying out of the
      public mind, by mere dint of its own absurdity, we find it succeeded by a
      heresy too palpably false to be long tolerated, but one which, in the
      brief period it has already endured, may be said to have accomplished more
      in the corruption of our Poetical Literature than all its other enemies
      combined. I allude to the heresy of _The Didactic. _It has been
      assumed, tacitly and avowedly, directly and indirectly, that the ultimate
      object of all Poetry is Truth. Every poem, it is said, should inculcate a
      morals and by this moral is the poetical merit of the work to be adjudged. We Americans especially have patronized this happy idea, and we Bostonians
      very especially have developed it in full. We have taken it into our heads
      that to write a poem simply for the poem’s sake, and to acknowledge such
      to have been our design, would be to confess ourselves radically wanting
      in the true poetic dignity and force:—but the simple fact is that
      would we but permit ourselves to look into our own souls we should
      immediately there discover that under the sun there neither exists nor _can
      _exist any work more thoroughly dignified, more supremely noble, than
      this very poem, this poem _per se, _this poem which is a poem and
      nothing more, this poem written solely for the poem’s sake. With as deep a reverence for the True as ever inspired the bosom of man, I
      would nevertheless limit, in some measure, its modes of inculcation. I
      would limit to enforce them. I would not enfeeble them by dissipation. The
      demands of Truth are severe. She has no sympathy with the myrtles. All _that
      _which is so indispensable in Song is precisely all _that _with
      which _she _has nothing whatever to do. It is but making her a
      flaunting paradox to wreathe her in gems and flowers. In enforcing a truth
      we need severity rather than efflorescence of language. We must be simple,
      precise, terse. We must be cool, calm, unimpassioned. In a word, we must
      be in that mood which, as nearly as possible, is the exact converse of the
      poetical. _He _must be blind indeed who does not perceive the radical
      and chasmal difference between the truthful and the poetical modes of
      inculcation. He must be theory-mad beyond redemption who, in spite of
      these differences, shall still persist in attempting to reconcile the
      obstinate oils and waters of Poetry and Truth. Dividing the world of mind into its three most immediately obvious
      distinctions, we have the Pure Intellect, Taste, and the Moral Sense. I
      place Taste in the middle, because it is just this position which in the
      mind it occupies. It holds intimate relations with either extreme; but
      from the Moral Sense is separated by so faint a difference that Aristotle
      has not hesitated to place some of its operations among the virtues
      themselves. Nevertheless we find the _offices _of the trio marked
      with a sufficient distinction. Just as the Intellect concerns itself with
      Truth, so Taste informs us of the Beautiful, while the Moral Sense is
      regardful of Duty. Of this latter, while Conscience teaches the
      obligation, and Reason the expediency, Taste contents herself with
      displaying the charms:—waging war upon Vice solely on the ground of
      her deformity—her disproportion—her animosity to the fitting,
      to the appropriate, to the harmonious—in a word, to Beauty. An immortal instinct deep within the spirit of man is thus plainly a sense
      of the Beautiful. This it is which administers to his delight in the
      manifold forms, and sounds, and odors and sentiments amid which he exists. And just as the lily is repeated in the lake, or the eyes of Amaryllis in
      the mirror, so is the mere oral or written repetition of these forms, and
      sounds, and colors, and odors, and sentiments a duplicate source of the
      light. But this mere repetition is not poetry. He who shall simply sing,
      with however glowing enthusiasm, or with however vivid a truth of
      description, of the sights, and sounds, and odors, and colors, and
      sentiments which greet _him _in common with all mankind—he, I
      say, has yet failed to prove his divine title. There is still a something
      in the distance which he has been unable to attain. We have still a thirst
      unquenchable, to allay which he has not shown us the crystal springs. This
      thirst belongs to the immortality of Man.