‘THEIR’ (the poets’) ‘language is vitally metaphorical; that is, it marks the before unapprehended relations of things and perpetuates their apprehension, until the words which represent them become, through time, signs for portions or classes of thoughts instead of pictures of integral thoughts; and then if no new poets should arise to create afresh the associations which have been thus disorganised, language will be dead to all the nobler purposes of human intercourse. These similitudes or relations are finely said by Lord Bacon to be “the same footsteps of nature impressed upon the various subjects of the world “(De Augment. Scient. Cap. I, Lib. III) — and he considers the faculty which perceives them as the storehouse of axioms common to all knowledge.’—SHELLEY, A Defence of Poetry.