A DEFENSE OF POETRY.

ACCORDING to one mode of regarding those two classes of mental action which are called reason and imagination, the former may be considered as mind contemplating the relations borne by one thought to another, however produced, and the 5 latter as mind acting upon those thoughts so as to color them with its own light, and composing from them, as from elements, other thoughts, each containing within itself the principle of its own integrity. The one is the Tò Toleîv, or the princi- 10 ple of synthesis, and has for its object those forms which are common to universal nature and existence itself; the other is the Tò λoyíše, or principle of analysis, and its action regards the relations of things simply as relations; considering thoughts 15 not in their integral unity, but as the algebraical representations which conduct to certain general results. Reason is the enumeration of quantities already known; imagination is the perception of the value of those quantities, both separately and 20 as a whole. Reason respects the differences, and imagination the similitudes of things. Reason is to imagination as the instrument to the agent, as the body to the spirit, as the shadow to the substance.

Shado

/ Reason is

to imag. instrument

as
25

I

Is to the

agent

body is to
spirit

Poetry, in a general sense, may be defined to be ‘the_expression of the imagination'; and poetry is connate with the origin of man. Man is an instrument over which a series of external and inter5 nal impressions are driven, like the alternations of an ever-changing wind over an Æolian lyre, which move it by their motion to ever-changing melody. But there is a principle within the human being, and perhaps within all sentient beings, which acts 10 otherwise than in a lyre, and produces not melody alone, but harmony, by an internal adjustment of the sounds and motions thus excited to the impressions which excite them. It is as if the lyre could accommodate its chords to the motions of 15 that which strikes them, in a determined proportion of sound; even as the musician can accommodate his voice to the sound of the lyre. A child at play by itself will express its delight by its voice and motions; and every inflection of tone and every 20 gesture will bear exact relation to a corresponding antitype in the pleasurable impressions which awakened it; it will be the reflected image of that impression; and as the lyre trembles and sounds after the wind has died away, so the child seeks, 25 by prolonging in its voice and motions the duration

of the effect, to prolong also a consciousness of the cause. In relation to the objects which delight a child, these expressions are what poetry is to higher objects (The savage (for the savage is to 30 ages what the child is to years) expresses the emotions produced in him by surrounding objects in a similar manner; and language and gesture, together with plastic or pictorial imitation, become

the image of the combined effect of those objects and his apprehension of them. Man in society, with all his passions and his pleasures, next becomes the object of the passions and pleasures of

expression

man; an additional class of emotions produces an 5 imitative

augmented treasure of expression; and language,
gesture, and the imitative arts, become at once the
representation and the medium, the pencil and the
picture, the chisel and the statue, the chord and
the harmony. The social sympathies, or those
laws from which, as from its elements, society
results, begin to develop themselves from the
moment that two human beings co-exist; the
future is contained within the present as the plant
within the seed; and equality, diversity, unity, 15
contrast, mutual dependence, become the prin-
ciples alone capable of affording the motives
according to which the will of a social being is
determined to action, inasmuch as he is social;
and constitute pleasure in sensation, virtue in sen- 2
timent, beauty in art, truth in reasoning, and love
in the intercourse of kind. Hence men, even in
the infancy of society, observe a certain order in
their words and actions, distinct from that of thes
objects and the impressions represented by them, 25
all expression being subject to the laws of that
from which it proceeds. But let us dismiss those
more general considerations which might involve
an inquiry into the principles of society itself, and
restrict our view to the manner in which the imag- 30
ination is expressed upon its forms.

In the youth of the world, men dance and sing and imitate natural objects, observing in these

arts

actions, as in all others, a certain rhythm or order. And, although all men observe a similar, they observe not the same order in the motions of the dance, in the melody of the song, in the combina5 tions of language, in the series of their imitations of natural objects. For there is a certain order or rhythm belonging to each of these classes of mimetic representation, from which the hearer and the spectator receive an intenser and purer pleas10 ure than from any other; the sense of an approxi

mation to this order has been called taste by modern writers. Every man, in the infancy of art, observes an order which approximates more or less closely to that from which this highest delight 15 results; but the diversity is not sufficiently marked as that its gradations should be sensible, except in those instances where the predominance of this faculty of approximation to the beautiful (for so we may be permitted to name the relation between 20 this highest pleasure and its cause) is very great. Those in whom it exists to excess are poets, in the most universal sense of the word; and the pleasure resulting from the manner in which they express the influence of society or nature upon their own 25 minds, communicates itself to others, and gathers a sort of reduplication from the community. Their language is vitally metaphorical; that is, it marks the before unapprehended relations of things and perpetuates their apprehension, until words. 30 which represent them, become, through time, signs for portions or classes of thought instead of pictures of integral thoughts; and then, if no new poets should arise to create afresh the associations

to be a

which have been thus disorganized, languag
be dead to all the nobler purposes of human
course. These similitudes or relations are
said by Lord Bacon to be "the same footsteps of
nature impressed upon the various subjects of the 5
world" and he considers the faculty which per-
ceives them as the storehouse of axioms common
to all knowledge. In the infancy of society every
author is necessarily a poet, because language
itself is poetry; and to be a poet is to apprehend 10
the true and the beautiful, in a word, the good
which exists in the relation subsisting, first be-
tween existence and perception, and secondly be-
tween perception and expression. Every original
language near to its source is in itself the chaos of
a cyclic poem; the copiousness of lexicography
and the distinctions of grammar are the works of
a later age, and are merely the catalogue and the
forms of the creations of poetry.

But poets, or those who imagine and express 20
this indestructible order, are not only the authors
of language and of music, of the dance, and archi-
tecture, and statuary, and painting: they are the
institutors of laws, and the founders of civil soci-
ety, and the inventors of the arts of life, and the 25
teachers who draw into a certain propinquity with
the beautiful and the true that partial apprehen-
sion of the agencies of the invisible world which
is called religion, Hence all original religions are
allegorical, or susceptible of allegory, and, like 3o
Janus, have a double face of false and true. Poets,
according to the circumstances of the age and
nation in which they appeared, were called, in the

poet is
to apprehend
the good

btwn
11/existenced

perception perception expression