The Worlds Best Poetry, Volume 10 | Page 4

filled with all the
weapons and engines which man's skill has been able to devise from
the earliest time; and he works, accordingly, with a strength borrowed
from all past ages. How different is his state who stands on the outside
of that storehouse, and feels that its gates must be stormed, or remain
forever shut against him! His means are the commonest and rudest; the

mere work done is no measure of his strength. A dwarf behind his
steam-engine may remove mountains; but no dwarf will hew them
down with a pickaxe; and he must be a Titan that hurls them abroad
with his arms.
"It is in this last shape that Burns presents himself.... Impelled by the
expansive movement of his own irrepressible soul, he struggles forward
into the general view; and with haughty modesty lays down before us,
as the fruit of his labor, a gift, which Time has now pronounced
imperishable."
But why should one read poetry, at all, where there is so much good
prose to be read? Herbert Spencer in his essay on "Style" gives some
reasons for the superiority of poetry to prose. He says:
"Poetry, we shall find, habitually adopts those symbols of thought and
those methods of using them which instinct and analysis agree in
choosing, as most effective, and becomes poetry by virtue of doing this.
"Thus, poetry, regarded as a vehicle of thought, is especially impressive,
partly because it obeys all the laws of effective speech and partly
because in so doing it imitates the natural utterances of excitement.
While the matter embodied is idealized emotion, the vehicle is the
idealized language of emotion. As the musical composer catches the
cadences in which our feelings of joy and sympathy, grief and despair,
vent themselves, and out of these germs evolves melodies suggesting
higher phases of these feelings; so the poet develops from the typical
expressions in which men utter passion and sentiments those choice
forms of verbal combination in which concentrated passion and
sentiment may be fitly presented."
And the language which Spencer regards as the "most effective" is
tersely set forth by that poetic and spiritual preacher, Frederick W.
Robertson, in his idea of poetry: "The natural language of excited
feeling, and a work of imagination wrought into form by art."
Another point in connection with the language of poetry is that,
compelled by their limitations of rhythm, rhyme, and the compression
of much thought and feeling into brief space, the poets have become the
finest artists in the use of words. The examples of word-use in the
dictionaries are largely drawn from the poets. Joseph Joubert, the
French epigrammatist, says:
"Like the nectar of the bee, which turns to honey the dust of flowers, or

like that liquor which converts lead into gold, the poet has a breath that
fills out words, gives them light and color. He knows wherein consists
their charm, and by what art enchanted structures may be built with
them."
Familiarity with poetry thus becomes to the attentive reader an
insensible training in language, as well as an elevation of mind and
spirit. Superiority of spirit and of form, then, offers good reasons why
the intelligent--whether for stimulation, consolation, self-culture, or
mere amusement in idle hours--should avail of a due proportion of this
finest expression of the sweetest, the highest, and the deepest emotional
experiences of life, in the realms of nature, of art, and of humanity
itself.
A few words from the gifted William Ellery Channing the elder
epitomize some striking thoughts on this subject:
"We believe that poetry, far from injuring society, is one of the great
instruments of its refinement and exaltation. It lifts the mind above
ordinary life, gives it a respite from depressing cares, and awakens the
consciousness of its affinity with what is pure and noble. In its
legitimate and highest efforts it has the same tendency and aim with
Christianity,--that is, to spiritualize our nature.... The present life,
which is the first stage of the immortal mind, abounds in the materials
of poetry, and it is the highest office of the bard, to detect this divine
element among the grosser pleasures and labors of our earthly being.
The present life is not wholly prosaic, precise, tame, and finite. To the
gifted eye it abounds in the poetic....
"It is not true that the poet paints a life which does not exist. He only
extracts and concentrates, as it were, life's ethereal essence, arrests and
condenses its volatile fragrance, brings together its scattered beauties,
and prolongs its more refined but evanescent joys: and in this he does
well; for it is good to feel that life is not wholly usurped by cares for
subsistence and physical gratifications, but admits, in measures which
may be indefinitely enlarged, sentiments and delights