jerks, the breaks, the inequalities, and
harshnesses of prose are fatal to the flow of a poetical imagination, as a
jolting road or a stumbling horse disturbs the reverie of an absent man.
But poetry makes these odds all even. It is the music of language,
answering to the music of the mind, untying as it were "the secret soul of
harmony." Wherever any object takes such a hold of the mind as to make us
dwell upon it, and brood over it, melting the heart in tenderness, or
kindling it to a sentiment of enthusiasm;--wherever a movement of
imagination or passion is impressed on the mind, by which it seeks to
prolong and repeat the emotion, to bring all other objects into accord
with it, and to give the same movement of harmony, sustained and
continuous, or gradually varied according to the occasion, to the sounds
that express it--this is poetry. The musical in sound is the sustained and
continuous; the musical in thought is the sustained and continuous also.
There is a near connection between music and deep-rooted passion. Mad
people sing. As often as articulation passes naturally into intonation,
there poetry begins. Where one idea gives a tone and colour to others,
where one feeling melts others into it, there can be no reason why the
same principle should not be extended to the sounds by which the voice
utters these emotions of the soul, and blends syllables and lines into
each other. It is to supply the inherent defect of harmony in the
customary mechanism of language, to make the sound an echo to the sense,
when the sense becomes a sort of echo to itself--to mingle the tide of
verse, "the golden cadences of poetry," with the tide of feeling, flowing
and murmuring as it flows--in short, to take the language of the
imagination from off the ground, and enable it to spread its wings where
it may indulge its own impulses--

"Sailing with supreme dominion
Through the azure deep of air"--

without being stopped, or fretted, or diverted with the abruptnesses and
petty obstacles, and discordant flats and sharps of prose, that poetry was
invented. It is to common language, what springs are to a carriage, or
wings to feet. In ordinary speech we arrive at a certain harmony by the
modulations of voice: in poetry the same thing is done systematically by a
regular collocation of syllables. It has been well observed, that every
one who declaims warmly, or grows intent upon a subject, rises into a sort
of blank verse or measured pr