. At the end of a very short
leap they fall plump down and rot, having received from the souls out of
which they came no beautiful wings. But the melodies of the poet ascend
and leap and pierce into the deeps of infinite time.

So far the bard taught me, using his freer speech. But nature has a
higher end, in the production of New individuals, than security, namely
ascension, or the passage of the soul into higher forms. I knew in my
younger days the sculptor who made the statue of the youth which stands
in the public garden. He was, as I remember, unable to tell directly,
what made him happy or unhappy, but by wonderful indirections he could
tell. He rose one day, according to his habit, before the dawn, and saw
the morning break, grand as the eternity out of which it came, and for
many days after, he strove to express this tranquillity, and lo! his
chisel had fashioned out of marble the form of a beautiful youth,
Phosphorus, whose aspect is such that it is said all persons who look
on it become silent. The poet also resigns himself to his mood, and that
thought which agitated him is expressed, but alter idem, in a manner
totally new. The expression is organic, or the new type which things
themselves take when liberated. As, in the sun, objects paint their
images on the retina of the eye, so they, sharing the aspiration of the
whole universe, tend to paint a far more delicate copy of their essence
in his mind. Like the metamorphosis of things into higher organic forms
is their change into melodies. Over everything stands its daemon or
soul, and, as the form of the thing is reflected by the eye, so the
soul of the thing is reflected by a melody. The sea, the mountain-ridge,
Niagara, and every flower-bed, pre-exist, or super-exist, in
pre-cantations, which sail like odors in the air, and when any man goes
by with an ear sufficiently fine, he overhears them and endeavors to
write down the notes without diluting or depraving them. And herein is
the legitimation of criticism, in the mind's faith that the poems are a
corrupt version of some text in nature with which they ought to be made
to tally. A rhyme in one of our sonnets should not be less pleasing than
the iterated nodes of a sea-shell, or the resembling difference of a
group of flowers. The pairing of the birds is an idyl, not tedious as
our idyls are; a tempest is a rough ode, without falsehood or rant;
a summer, with its harvest sown, reaped, and stored, is an epic