Lectures on the English Poets | Page 7

feet of the disciples the night before his death. But that
chapter does not need a commentary! It is for want of some such
resting place for the imagination that the Greek statues are little else
than specious forms. They are marble to the touch and to the heart.
They have not an informing principle within them. In their faultless

excellence they appear sufficient to themselves. By their beauty they
are raised above the frailties of passion or suffering. By their beauty
they are deified. But they are not objects of religious faith to us, and
their forms are a reproach to common humanity. They seem to have no
sympathy with us, and not to want our admiration.
Poetry in its matter and form is natural imagery or feeling, combined
with passion and fancy. In its mode of conveyance, it combines the
ordinary use of language with musical expression. There is a question
of long standing, in what the essence of poetry consists; or what it is
that determines why one set of ideas should be expressed in prose,
another in verse. Milton has told us his idea of poetry in a single line--
"Thoughts that voluntary move
Harmonious numbers."
As there are certain sounds that excite certain movements, and the song
and dance go together, so there are, no doubt, certain thoughts that lead
to certain tones of voice, or modulations of sound, and change "the
words of Mercury into the songs of Apollo." There is a striking
instance of this adaptation of the movement of sound and rhythm to the
subject, in Spenser's description of the Satyrs accompanying Una to the
cave of Sylvanus.
"So from the ground she fearless doth arise
And walketh forth without suspect of crime.
They, all as glad as birds
of joyous prime,
Thence lead her forth, about her dancing round,
Shouting and singing
all a shepherd's rhyme;
And with green branches strewing all the ground,
Do worship her as
queen with olive garland crown'd.
And all the way their merry pipes they sound,
That all the woods and
doubled echoes ring;
And with their horned feet do wear the ground,

Leaping like wanton kids in pleasant spring;
So towards old

Sylvanus they her bring,
Who with the noise awaked, cometh out."
Faery Queen, b. i. c. vi.
On the contrary, there is nothing either musical or natural in the
ordinary construction of language. It is a thing altogether arbitrary and
conventional. Neither in the sounds themselves, which are the
voluntary signs of certain ideas, nor in their grammatical arrangements
in common speech, is there any principle of natural imitation, or
correspondence to the individual ideas, or to the tone of feeling with
which they are conveyed to others. The jerks, the breaks, the
inequalities, and harshnesses of prose, are fatal to the flow of a poetical
imagination, as a jolting road or a stumbling horse disturbs the reverie
of an absent man. But poetry makes these odds all even. It is the music
of language, answering to the music of the mind, untying as it were
"the secret soul of harmony." Wherever any object takes such a hold of
the mind as to make us dwell upon it, and brood over it, melting the
heart in tenderness, or kindling it to a sentiment of enthusiasm;--
wherever a movement of imagination or passion is impressed on the
mind, by which it seeks to prolong and repeat the emotion, to bring all
other objects into accord with it, and to give the same movement of
harmony, sustained and continuous, or gradually varied according to
the occasion, to the sounds that express it--this is poetry. The musical
in sound is the sustained and continuous; the musical in thought is the
sustained and continuous also. There is a near connection between
music and deep-rooted passion. Mad people sing. As often as
articulation passes naturally into intonation, there poetry begins. Where
one idea gives a tone and colour to others, where one feeling melts
others into it, there can be no reason why the same principle should not
be extended to the sounds by which the voice utters these emotions of
the soul, and blends syllables and lines into each other. It is to supply
the inherent defect of harmony in the customary mechanism of
language, to make the sound an echo to the sense, when the sense
becomes a sort of echo to itself--to mingle the tide of verse, "the golden
cadences of poetry," with the tide of feeling, flowing and murmuring as

it flows--in short, to take the language of the imagination from off the
ground, and enable it to spread its wings where it may indulge its own
impulses--
"Sailing with supreme dominion
Through the azure deep of air--"
without being stopped, or fretted, or diverted with the abruptnesses and
petty obstacles, and discordant flats and