PART SECOND.

THE LANGUAGE OF POESY.

CHAPTER I.

GENERAL.

ROSCIUS challenged Cicero to express his ideas by spoken language faster and more clearly than he himself could by gesture; and cases without number will occur to every mind where feeling, in coming to the surface, finds, and ever has found for its expression, means far more eloquent than words. Properly, therefore, the art of poesy should consider any and every expression whereby man has been able to unburden his mind of poetic feeling, whether in so doing he transfers that load to the bosom of another, or with no eye, no ear to witness, launches it on the passing breeze. That woman who, when the Western Highlands of Scotland were visited, as Ireland was about the same time, with

a dearth so great, so awful, that in the memory of man nothing like it had been seen, in the proud spirit of independence by which the clansmen are generally marked, chose rather than ask for the food which had been sent thither by the charity of the lowland towns, to go without nourishment for days together, but at length when overcome by suffering, and almost starved to death, drew nigh to where the almoners were dealing out their bounty, and ashamed to beg, only bared her arm, and lifted it up to show how lank and shrivelled it had become; she, little as she thought of art, was in the same sense in which we may so call any poet who pours forth unpremeditated strains-an artist. Here, we confine ourselves to the artistic employment of words.

That the poet is of imagination all compact every one will readily admit. But in what way his peculiar faculty works, and, above all, how it outwardly betokens its presence in language, have long been mooted. Most people have felt and believed Verse to be the distinguishing trait of poetic utterance; while a few have maintained that verse is quite a secondary matter, and that the true shibboleth is Imagery.

Aristotle seems to say that an Epopee may be composed either in prose (yiλoîs λóyois, bare words) or in metre; and he afterwards roundly declares as much as that a writer-Empedocles-may have the musical gift of a Homer, and yet have nothing else in common which may entitle him to the name of poet. Other

writers regard verse as equally accidental. Sismondi holds, that at first it was merely a help to the memory; and Mr Disraeli, in the preface to his Wondrous Tale of Alroy, while he puts in a salvo for the lower form of verse, commonly called rhythmical prose, says the very same of the higher forms, that they were merely the aids of memory, the offspring of an unlettered age, and that they are no longer needed by us who commit everything to paper. Wordsworth likewise, in the appendix to a very celebrated preface, affirms, that "metre is but adventitious to composition ;" and Coleridge says, that it is "simply a stimulant of the attention," which, if true, would render all his other theories very needless, and which is at once seen to be false when placed beside the parallel theory of a French writer, Cerceau by name, who maintained that the inversion of its grammar is all that distinguishes the verse from the prose of his countrymen, and that this inversion is but a stimulant. Even those who, like Archbishop Whately, consider verse to be an essential of poesy, have never shown on satisfying grounds why it should be so; they have never shown the necessity by which the expression of poetic feeling becomes metrical.

Had we to choose between Verse and Imagery, the former is certainly the more worthy badge of a poet, and it is also the more searching test; because while imposing imagery can be supplied to any extent by mechanical rule, if not by native impulse, none but a

true poet can send forth a strain that will "vibrate in the memory." No one can move his lips in the heat of inspiration without moving harmonious numbers. Every thought that he breathes will draw music from language as from a wind-harp, else it is not the breath of heaven, nor of heavenly powers. When the answers of the Priestess of Apollo were couched in prose, as they sometimes were, and from the time of Pyrrhus always were delivered, it was a proof that inspiration had departed from the Pythia. And should any man who is a poet divorce his thoughts from music, and be content habitually to send them forth in prose, he hath sundered what God hath joined. If Carvilius Spurius was known and hated at Rome as the first of all the Romans who divorced his wife, and who divorced her for being childless, be assured that Plato, the first on record who forsook poesy for prose, would be remembered in like manner, had he not otherwise redeemed his fame, and had we not been averse from visiting literary sins with the indignation due to moral offences.

But in truth we are not called upon to make a choice between the two. Both have their rights, both are to be accepted. Verse and Imagery, the sacramental mysteries of poesy, are twin-born. They come to us together; we must keep them and explain them together.

The three laws of poetry take part in the genesis of both these forms; but the first law takes the chief part. Since poetry passes through the imagination to and

from the soul of man, it is perfect or imperfect according as it adapts itself more or less to the forms of that faculty. But since the imagination is a copy of sense, its forms must be those of its pattern. Now, according to Kant's analysis, the leading forms of sense, under which everything is perceived, are Time and Space. These, therefore, belong to the imagination. It follows, that whatever comes naturally and freely from the imagination will be, and that whatever would touch it powerfully must be, moulded by these forms. Poesy therefore, or, since speech is a sensuous faculty, we may say language generally, as it nears perfection, will own these forms more or less entirely. It will bring out the idea of Time by the use of timed or measured words, and it will fulfil the idea of Space by means of imagery.