en syllables with like
endings: but wherever there is a sense of beauty, or power, or harmony, as
in the motion of a wave of the sea, in the growth of a flower that
"spreads its sweet leaves to the air and dedicates its beauty to the
sun,"--_there_ is poetry, in its birth. If history is a grave study,
poetry may be said to be a graver: its materials lie deeper, and are
spread wider. History treats, for the most part, of the cumbrous and
unwieldy masses of things, the empty cases in which the affairs of the
world are packed, under the heads of intrigue or war, in different states,
and from century to century: but there is no thought or feeling that can
have entered into the mind of man, which he would be eager to communicate
to others, or which they would listen to with delight, that is not a fit
subject for poetry. It is not a branch of authorship: it is "the stuff of
which our life is made." The rest is "mere oblivion," a dead letter: for
all that is worth remembering in life, is the poetry of it. Fear is
poetry, hope is poetry, love is poetry, hatred is poetry; contempt,
jealousy, remorse, admiration, wonder, pity, despair, or madness, are all
poetry. Poetry is that fine particle within us, that expands, rarefies,
refines, raises our whole being: without it "man's life is poor as
beast's." Man is a poetical animal: and those of us who do not study the
principles of poetry, act upon them all our lives, like Moliere's
_Bourgeois Gentilhomme_, who had always spoken prose without knowing it.
The child is a poet in fact, when he first plays at hide-and-seek, or
repeats the story of Jack the Giant-killer; the shepherd-boy is a poet,
when he first crowns his mistress with a garland of flowers; the
countryman, when he stops to look at the rainbow; the city-apprentice,
when he gazes after the Lord-Mayor's show; the miser, when he hugs his
gold; the courtier, who builds his hopes upon a smile; the savage, who
paints his idol with blood; the slave, who worships a tyrant, or the
tyrant, who fancies himself a god;--the vain, the ambitious, the proud,
the choleric man, the hero and the coward, the beggar and the king, the
rich and the poor, the young and the old, all live in a world of their
own making; and the poet does no more than describe what all the others
think and act. If his art is folly and madness, it is folly and madness at
second hand. "There is warrant for it." Poets alone have not "such
seething brains, such shaping fa