nd the commerce of America are alike.

The world being thus put under the mind for verb and noun, the poet is
he who can articulate it. For though life is great, and fascinates, and
absorbs; and though all men are intelligent of the symbols through which
it is named; yet they cannot originally use them. We are symbols and
inhabit symbols; workmen, work, and tools, words and things, birth and
death, all are emblems; but we sympathize with the symbols, and being
infatuated with the economical uses of things, we do not know that they
are thoughts. The poet, by an ulterior intellectual perception, gives
them a power which makes their old use forgotten, and puts eyes and
a tongue into every dumb and inanimate object. He perceives the
independence of the thought on the symbol, the stability of the thought,
the accidency and fugacity of the symbol. As the eyes of Lyncaeus were
said to see through the earth, so the poet turns the world to glass, and
shows us all things in their right series and procession. For through
that better perception he stands one step nearer to things, and sees
the flowing or metamorphosis; perceives that thought is multiform; that
within the form of every creature is a force impelling it to ascend
into a higher form; and following with his eyes the life, uses the forms
which express that life, and so his speech flows with the flowing of
nature. All the facts of the animal economy, sex, nutriment, gestation,
birth, growth, are symbols of the passage of the world into the soul
of man, to suffer there a change and reappear a new and higher fact. He
uses forms according to the life, and not according to the form. This is
true science. The poet alone knows astronomy, chemistry, vegetation
and animation, for he does not stop at these facts, but employs them as
signs. He knows why the plain or meadow of space was strewn with these
flowers we call suns and moons and stars; why the great deep is adorned
with animals, with men, and gods; for in every word he speaks he rides
on them as the horses of thought.

By virtue of this science the poet is the Namer or Language-maker,
naming things sometimes after their appearance, sometimes after their
essence, and giving to every one its own name and not another's, thereby
rejoicing the intellect, which delights in detachment or boundary. The
poets made all the words, and therefore language is the archives of
history, and, if we must say it, a sort of tomb of the muses.