Essays, Second Series | Page 6

of the poet,
and no one knows how much it may concern him. We know that the
secret of the world is profound, but who or what shall be our interpreter,
we know not. A mountain ramble, a new style of face, a new person,
may put the key into our hands. Of course the value of genius to us is in
the veracity of its report. Talent may frolic and juggle; genius realizes
and adds. Mankind in good earnest have availed so far in understanding
themselves and their work, that the foremost watchman on the peak
announces his news. It is the truest word ever spoken, and the phrase
will be the fittest, most musical, and the unerring voice of the world for
that time.
All that we call sacred history attests that the birth of a poet is the
principal event in chronology. Man, never so often deceived, still
watches for the arrival of a brother who can hold him steady to a truth
until he has made it his own. With what joy I begin to read a poem
which I confide in as an inspiration! And now my chains are to be
broken; I shall mount above these clouds and opaque airs in which I
live,--opaque, though they seem transparent, --and from the heaven of
truth I shall see and comprehend my relations. That will reconcile me
to life and renovate nature, to see trifles animated by a tendency, and to
know what I am doing. Life will no more be a noise; now I shall see
men and women, and know the signs by which they may be discerned
from fools and satans. This day shall be better than my birthday: then I
became an animal; now I am invited into the science of the real. Such is

the hope, but the fruition is postponed. Oftener it falls that this winged
man, who will carry me into the heaven, whirls me into mists, then
leaps and frisks about with me as it were from cloud to cloud, still
affirming that he is bound heavenward; and I, being myself a novice,
am slow in perceiving that he does not know the way into the heavens,
and is merely bent that I should admire his skill to rise like a fowl or a
flying fish, a little way from the ground or the water; but the
all-piercing, all-feeding, and ocular air of heaven that man shall never
inhabit. I tumble down again soon into my old nooks, and lead the life
of exaggerations as before, and have lost my faith in the possibility of
any guide who can lead me thither where I would be.
But, leaving these victims of vanity, let us, with new hope, observe
how nature, by worthier impulses, has ensured the poet's fidelity to his
office of announcement and affirming, namely by the beauty of things,
which becomes a new and higher beauty when expressed. Nature offers
all her creatures to him as a picture-language. Being used as a type, a
second wonderful value appears in the object, far better than its old
value; as the carpenter's stretched cord, if you hold your ear close
enough, is musical in the breeze. "Things more excellent than every
image," says Jamblichus, "are expressed through images." Things
admit of being used as symbols because nature is a symbol, in the
whole, and in every part. Every line we can draw in the sand has
expression; and there is no body without its spirit or genius. All form is
an effect of character; all condition, of the quality of the life; all
harmony, of health; and for this reason a perception of beauty should be
sympathetic, or proper only to the good. The beautiful rests on the
foundations of the necessary. The soul makes the body, as the wise
Spenser teaches:--
"So every spirit, as it is most pure, And hath in it the more of heavenly
light, So it the fairer body doth procure To habit in, and it more fairly
dight, With cheerful grace and amiable sight. For, of the soul, the body
form doth take, For soul is form, and doth the body make."
Here we find ourselves suddenly not in a critical speculation but in a
holy place, and should go very warily and reverently. We stand before
the secret of the world, there where Being passes into Appearance and
Unity into Variety.
The Universe is the externization of the soul. Wherever the life is, that

bursts into appearance around it. Our science is sensual, and therefore
superficial. The earth and the heavenly bodies, physics, and chemistry,
we sensually treat, as if they were self-existent; but these are the retinue
of that Being we have. "The mighty heaven," said Proclus, "exhibits, in
its transfigurations, clear