. Inspired by an ecstatic prescience of the
glories beyond the grave, we struggle, by multiform combinations among
the things and thoughts of Time, to attain a portion of that Loveliness
whose very elements, perhaps, appertain to eternity alone. And thus
when by Poetry--or when by Music, the most entrancing of the Poetic
moods--we find ourselves melted into tears not as the Abbate Gravia
supposes through excess of pleasure, but through a certain petulant,
impatient sorrow at our inability to grasp now, wholly, here on earth,
at once and forever, those divine and rapturous joys, of which
_through_ the poem, or _through_ the music, we attain to but brief and
indeterminate glimpses.

The struggle to apprehend the supernal Loveliness--this struggle, on
the part of souls fittingly constituted--has given to the world all
that which it (the world) has ever been enabled at once to understand
and to feel as poetic.

The Poetic Sentiment, of course, may develop itself in various
modes--in Painting, in Sculpture, in Architecture, in the Dance--very
especially in Music,--and very peculiarly and with a wide field, in the
composition of the Landscape Garden. Our present theme, however, has
regard only to its manifestation in words. And here let me speak
briefly on the topic of rhythm. Contenting myself with the certainty
that Music, in its various modes of metre, rhythm, and rhyme, is of so
vast a moment in Poetry as never to be wisely rejected--is so vitally
important an adjunct, that he is simply silly who declines its
assistance--I will not now pause to maintain its absolute essentiality.
It is in Music, perhaps, that the soul most nearly attains the great
end for which, when inspired by the Poetic Sentiment, it struggles--the
creation of supernal Beauty. It may be, indeed, that here this sublime
end is, now and then, attained in fact. We are often made to feel,
with a shivering delight, that from an earthly harp are stricken notes
which cannot have been unfamiliar to the angels. And thus there can be
little doubt that in the union of Poetry with Music in its popular
sense we shall find the widest field for the Poetic development. The
old Bards and Minnesingers had advantages which we do not possess--and
Thomas Moore, singing his own songs, was, in the most legitimate
manner, perfecting them as poems.

To recapitulate, then:--I would define, in brief, the Poetry of words
as _The Rhythmical Creation of Beauty_. Its sol