our most awakened enthusiasm,
nothing less than two distinct _Worlds of Thinking_.

How so commanding, so permeating, so vivifying, and so transfusing a power
should reside in a fact of human speech, seemingly so slight and slender
as that ruled and mechanical adjustment of a few syllables which we call a
verse, is perhaps not explicable by our philosophy; but of the power
itself, the uniform history of mankind leaves us no liberty to doubt. Yet
may we understand something of this wonderful agency; and conceive how the
new and strange wealth of music brought out from words, of which the
speaker in verse finds himself the privileged master, may lift up, as on
wings, his courage to think and utter. We may suppose that the sweet and
melting, or the solemn, the prolonged, the proud swell, or flow, or fall
of his own numbers, may surprise his own ear, and seize his own soul with
unexpected emotions; and that off his guard and unawares, and, as grave
ancient writers have said, in a sort of sacred madness, he may be hurried
into inventions of greatness, of wonder, and beauty, which would have
remained for ever locked up and forbidden to the colder and more reserved
temper, which seems fittingly to accompany prose, the accustomed language
of Reason. Versification is Measure, and it is Harmony. If you hear the
measure you listen expectantly, and there is a recurring pleasure in the
fulfilment of that expectation. But the pleasure thus afforded would soon
be exhausted, did not the power of Harmony tell. That is a musical
pleasure which cannot be exhausted. Here, then, is a reason why the
natural music of speech shall be elaborated to its height in verse. You
assume that the mind of the orator, the historian, the philosopher, is
given up wholly to the truth of his matter. Therefore in him the palpable
study of harmonious periods (as in Isocrates) impairs your confidence in
his earnestness and sincerity. Not so, we venture to say, in the case of
the poet. In his composition the very law of the verse instals the sound
in a sort of mysterious sovereignty over the sense. He hurries or he
protracts--he swells notes as of an organ, he attenuates them as of a
flute. He seeks in the sound of words their power--and their power is
great--to paint notions and things--to imitate the twanging of a bow, the
hissing of an arrow, the roaring of the winds, the weltering of the waves.
His verse laughs with merriment, and wails with sorrow; and that,