orm of
the creations of poetry.

[10] _De Augment. Scient._, cap. i, lib. iii.

But poets, or those who imagine and express this indestructible order,
are not only the authors of language and of music, of the dance, and
architecture, and statuary, and painting; they are the institutors of
laws, and the founders of civil society, and the inventors of the arts
of life, and the teachers who draw into a certain propinquity with the
beautiful and the true, that partial apprehension of the agencies of
the invisible world which is called religion. Hence all original
religions are allegorical, or susceptible of allegory, and, like
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 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 according 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 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 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 the highest poetry without injuring it as poetry; and the choruses
of Aeschylus, 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 creations of
sculpture, painting, and music, are illustrations still more decisive.

Language, colour, form, and religious and civil habits of action, are
all the instruments and materials of poetry; they may be called poetry
by that 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 cu