6

POETS BOTH LEGISLATORS AND PROPHETS.

earlier epochs of the world, legislators or prophets; a poet essentially comprises and unites both these characters. For he not only beholds intensely the present as it is, and discovers those laws accord5 ing to which present things ought to be ordered, but he beholds the future in the present, and his thoughts are the germs of the flower and the fruit of latest time. Not that I assert poets to be prophets in the gross sense of the word, or that Io they can foretell the form as surely as they foreknow the spirit of events; such is the pretence of superstition, which would make poetry an attribute of prophecy, rather than prophecy an attribute of poetry. A poet participates in the eternal, the 15 infinite, and the one; as far as relates to his conceptions, time and place and number are not. The grammatical forms which express the moods of time, and the difference of persons, and the distinction of place, are convertible with respect to 20 the highest poetry without injuring it as poetry; and the choruses of Æschylus, and the Book of Job, and Dante's Paradise, would afford, more than any other writings, examples of this fact, if the limits of this essay did not forbid citation. The 25 creations of music, sculpture, and painting are illustrations still more decisive.

Language, color, form, and religious and civil habits of action, are all the instruments and materials of poetry; they may be called poetry by that 30 figure of speech which considers the effect as a synonym of the cause. But poetry in a more restricted sense expresses those arrangements of language, and especially metrical language, which

are created by that imperial faculty whose throne is curtained within the invisible nature of man. And this springs from the nature itself of language, which is a more direct representation of the actions and passions of our internal being, and is 5 susceptible of more various and delicate combinations, than color, form, or motion, and is more plastic and obedient to the control of that faculty of which it is the creation. For language is arbitrarily produced by the imagination, and has relation_10 to thoughts alone; but all other materials, instruments, and conditions of art have relations among each other, which limit and interpose between conception and expression. The former is as a mirror which reflects, the latter as a cloud which enfeebles, 15 the light of which both are mediums of communication. Hence the fame of sculptors, painters, and musicians, although the intrinsic powers of the great masters of these arts may yield in no degree to that of those who have employed language as 20 the hieroglyphic of their thoughts, has never equalled that of poets in the restricted sense of the term; as two performers of equal skill will produce unequal effects from a guitar and a harp. The fame of legislators and founders of religions, 25 so long as their institutions last, alone seems to exceed that of poets in the restricted sense; but it can scarcely be a question, whether, if we deduct the celebrity which their flattery of the gross opinions of the vulgar usually conciliates, together 30 with that which belonged to them in their higher character of poets, any excess will remain.

We have thus circumscribed the word poetry

within the limits of that art which is the most familiar and the most perfect expression of the faculty itself. It is necessary, however, to make the circle still narrower, and to determine the dis5 tinction between measured and unmeasured language; for the popular division into prose and verse is inadmissible in accurate philosophy.

Sounds as well as thoughts have relation both between each other and towards that which they 10 represent, and a perception of the order of those relations has always been found connected with a perception of the order of the relations of thoughts. Hence the language of poets has ever affected a sort of uniform and harmonious recurrence of 15 sound, without which it were not poetry, and which is scarcely less indispensable to the communication of its influence than the words themselves without reference to that peculiar order. Hence the vanity of translation; it were as wise 20 to cast a violet into a crucible that you might discover the formal principles of its color and odor, as seek to transfuse from one language into another the creations of a poet. The plant must spring again from its seed, or it will bear no flower — and 25 this is the burthen of the curse of Babel.

An observation of the regular mode of the recurrence of harmony in the language of poetical minds, together with its relation to music, produced metre, or a certain system of traditional forms of 30 harmony and language. Yet it is by no means essential that a poet should accommodate his language to this traditional form, so that the harmony, which is its spirit, be observed. The practice is

Plato

indeed convenient and popular, and to be preferred
especially in such composition as includes much
action; but every great poet must inevitably inno-
vate upon the example of his predecessors in the
exact structure of his peculiar versification. The 5
distinction between poets and prose writers is a
vulgar error. The distinction between philos
ophers and poets has been anticipated. Plato was
essentially a poet—the truth and splendor of his
imagery, and the melody of his language, are the 10
most intense that it is possible to conceive. He
rejected the harmony of the epic, dramatic, and
lyrical forms, because he sought to kindle a har-
mony in thoughts divested of shape and action,
and he forbore to invent any regular plan of rhythm 15
which would include, under determinate forms, the
varied pauses of his style. Cicero sought to imi-
tate the cadence of his periods, but with little suc-
cess. Lord Bacon was a poet. His language has
a sweet and majestic rhythm which satisfies the 20
sense, no less than the almost superhuman wisdom.
of his philosophy satisfies the intellect; it is a
strain which distends and then bursts the circum-
ference of the reader's mind, and pours itself forth
together with it into the universal element with 25
which it has perpetual sympathy. All the authors
of revolutions in opinion are not only necessarily
poets as they are inventors, nor even as their words
unveil the permanent analogy of things by images
which participate in the life of truth; but as their 30
periods are harmonious and rhythmical, and contain
in themselves the elements of verse; being the
echo of the eternal music. Nor are those supreme

poem is universal

poets, who have employed traditional forms of rhythm on account of the form and action of their subjects, less capable of perceiving and teaching the truth of things, than those who have omitted 5 that form. Shakespeare, Dante, and Milton (to confine ourselves to modern writers) are philosophers of the very loftiest power.

A poem is the very image of life expressed in its eternal truth. There is this difference between a 10 story and a poem, that a story is a catalogue of detached facts, which have no other connection than time, place, circumstance, cause and effect; the other is the creation of actions according to the unchangeable forms of human nature, as exist15 ing in the mind of the creator, which is itself the image of all other minds. The one is partial, and applies only to a definite period of time, and a certain combination of events which can never again recur; the other is universal, and contains within 20 itself the germ of a relation to whatever motives or actions have place in the possible varieties of human nature Time, which destroys the beauty and the use of the story of particular facts, stripped of the poetry which should invest them, 25 augments that of poetry, and for ever develops new and wonderful applications of the eternal truth which it contains. Hence epitomes have been called the moths of just history; they eat out the poetry of it. A story of particular facts is as a 30 mirror which obscures and distorts that which should be beautiful; poetry is a mirror which makes beautiful that which is distorted

The parts of a composition may be poetical,

Poetry perfects