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Page 29
Poetry is indeed something divine. It is at once the centre and
circumference of knowledge; it is that which comprehends all science,
and that to which all science must be referred. It is at the same
time the root and blossom of all other systems of thought; it is
that from which all spring, and that which adorns all; and that
which, if blighted, denies the fruit and the seed, and withholds
from the barren world the nourishment and the succession of the
scions of the tree of life. It is the perfect and consummate surface
and bloom of all things; it is as the odour and the colour of the
rose to the texture of the elements which compose it, as the form
and splendour of unfaded beauty to the secrets of anatomy and
corruption. What were virtue, love, patriotism, friendship--what
were the scenery of this beautiful universe which we inhabit; what
were our consolations on this side of the grave--and what were our
aspirations beyond it, if poetry did not ascend to bring light and
fire from those eternal regions where the owl-winged faculty of
calculation dare not ever soar? Poetry is not like reasoning, a
power to be exerted according to the determination of the will. A
man cannot say, 'I will compose poetry.' The greatest poet even cannot
say it; for the mind in creation is as a fading coal, which some
invisible influence, like an inconstant wind, awakens to transitory
brightness; this power arises from within, like the colour of a
flower which fades and changes as it is developed, and the conscious
portions of our natures are unprophetic either of its approach or
its departure. Could this influence be durable in its original
purity and force, it is impossible to predict the greatness of the
results; but when composition begins, inspiration is already on the
decline, and the most glorious poetry that has ever been communicated
to the world is probably a feeble shadow of the original conceptions
of the poet. I appeal to the greatest poets of the present day,
whether it is not an error to assert that the finest passages of
poetry are produced by labour and study. The toil and the delay
recommended by critics, can be justly interpreted to mean no more
than a careful observation of the inspired moments, and an artificial
connexion of the spaces between their suggestions by the intertexture
of conventional expressions; a necessity only imposed by the
limitedness of the poetical faculty itself; for Milton conceived
the Paradise Lost as a whole before he executed it in portions; We
have his own authority also for the muse having 'dictated' to him
the 'unpremeditated song'. And let this be an answer to those who
would allege the fifty-six various readings of the first line of
the Orlando Furioso. Compositions so produced are to poetry what
mosaic is to painting. This instinct and intuition of the poetical
faculty, is still more observable in the plastic and pictorial arts;
a great statue or picture grows under the power of the artist as
a child in the mother's womb; and the very mind which directs the
hands in formation is incapable of accounting to itself for the
origin, the gradations, or the media of the process.
Poetry is the record of the best and happiest moments of the happiest
and best minds. We are aware of evanescent visitations of thought
and feeling sometimes associated with place or person, sometimes
regarding our own mind alone, and always arising unforeseen
and departing unbidden, but elevating and delightful beyond all
expression; so that even in the desire and regret they leave, there
cannot but be pleasure, participating as it does in the nature
of its object. It is as it were the interpenetration of a diviner
nature through our own; but its footsteps are like those of a wind
over the sea, which the coming calm erases, and whose traces remain
only, as on the wrinkled sand which paves it. These and corresponding
conditions of being are experienced principally by those of the
most delicate sensibility and the most enlarged imagination; and the
state of mind produced by them is at war with every base desire.
The enthusiasm of virtue, love, patriotism, and friendship,
is essentially linked with such emotions; and whilst they last,
self appears as what it is, an atom to a universe. Poets are not
only subject to these experiences as spirits of the most refined
organization, but they can colour all that they combine with the
evanescent hues of this ethereal world; a word, a trait in the
representation of a scene or a passion, will touch the enchanted
chord, and reanimate, in those who have ever experienced these
emotions, the sleeping, the cold, the buried image of the past.
Poetry thus makes immortal all that is best and most beautiful in
the world; it arrests the vanishing apparitions which haunt the
interlunations of life, and veiling them, or in language or in form,
sends them forth among mankind, bearing sweet news of kindred joy
to those with whom their sisters abide--abide, because there is
no portal of expression from the caverns of the spirit which they
inhabit into the universe of things. Poetry redeems from decay the
visitations of the divinity in man.
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