Essays, Second Series | Page 9

and to the hearer.
The etymologist finds the deadest word to have been once a brilliant
picture. Language is fossil poetry. As the limestone of the continent
consists of infinite masses of the shells of animalcules, so language is
made up of images or tropes, which now, in their secondary use, have
long ceased to remind us of their poetic origin. But the poet names the
thing because he sees it, or comes one step nearer to it than any other.
This expression or naming is not art, but a second nature, grown out of
the first, as a leaf out of a tree. What we call nature is a certain
self-regulated motion or change; and nature does all things by her own
hands, and does not leave another to baptize her but baptizes herself;
and this through the metamorphosis again. I remember that a certain
poet described it to me thus:

Genius is the activity which repairs the decays of things, whether
wholly or partly of a material and finite kind. Nature, through all her
kingdoms, insures herself. Nobody cares for planting the poor fungus;
so she shakes down from the gills of one agaric countless spores, any
one of which, being preserved, transmits new billions of spores
to-morrow or next day. The new agaric of this hour has a chance which
the old one had not. This atom of seed is thrown into a new place, not
subject to the accidents which destroyed its parent two rods off. She
makes a man; and having brought him to ripe age, she will no longer
run the risk of losing this wonder at a blow, but she detaches from him
a new self, that the kind may be safe from accidents to which the
individual is exposed. So when the soul of the poet has come to
ripeness of thought, she detaches and sends away from it its poems or
songs,--a fearless, sleepless, deathless progeny, which is not exposed to
the accidents of the weary kingdom of time; a fearless, vivacious
offspring, clad with wings (such was the virtue of the soul out of which
they came) which carry them fast and far, and infix them irrecoverably
into the hearts of men. These wings are the beauty of the poet's soul.
The songs, thus flying immortal from their mortal parent, are pursued
by clamorous flights of censures, which swarm in far greater numbers
and threaten to devour them; but these last are not winged. 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