of translation; it were as wise to cast a violet into a crucible that
you might discover the formal principle of its colour and odour, 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 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 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 indeed
convenient and popular, and to be preferred, especially in such
composition as includes much action: but every great poet must
inevitably innovate upon the example of his predecessors in the exact
structure of his peculiar versification. The distinction between poets
and prose writers is a vulgar error. The distinction between
philosophers and poets has been anticipated. Plato was essentially a
poet--the truth and splendour of his imagery, and the melody of his
language, are the most intense that it is possible to conceive. He
rejected the measure of the epic, dramatic, and lyrical forms, because
he sought to kindle a harmony in thoughts divested of shape and
action, and he forbore to invent any regular plan of rhythm which
would include, under determinate forms, the varied pauses of his
style. Cicero sought to imitate the cadence of his periods, but with
little success. Lord Bacon was a poet.[11] His language has a sweet
and majestic rhythm, which satisfies the sense, no less than the
almost superhuman wisdom of his philosophy satisfies the intellect; it
is a strain which distends, and then bursts the circumference of the
reader's mind, and pours itself forth together with it into the
universal element with 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 periods are harmonious and rhythmical, and contain in
themselves the elements of verse; being the echo of the eternal music.
Nor are those supreme poets, who have employed traditional forms of
rhythm on account of the form and action of their subjects