sist in attempting to reconcile the obstinate oils and waters of Poetry and Truth. Dividing the world of mind into its three most immediately obvious distinctions, we have the Pure Intellect, Taste, and the Moral Sense. I place Taste in the middle, because it is just this position which, in the mind, it occupies. It holds intimate relations with either extreme, but from the Moral Sense is separated by so faint a difference that Aristotle has not hesitated to place some of its operations among the virtues themselves. Nevertheless, we find the offices of the trio marked with a sufficient distinction. Just as the Intellect concerns itself with Truth, so Taste informs us of the Beautiful, while the Moral Sense is regardful of Duty. Of this latter, while Conscience teaches the obligation, and Reason the expediency, Taste contents herself with displaying the charms; waging war upon Vice solely on the ground of her deformity, her disproportion, her animosity to the fitting, to the appropriate, to the harmonious,—in a word, to Beauty. An immortal instinct, deep within the spirit of man, is thus, plainly, a sense of the Beautiful. This it is which administers to his delight in the manifold forms and sounds and odors and sentiments amid which he exists. And just as the lily is repeated in the lake, or the eyes of Amaryllis in the mirror, so is the mere oral or written repetition of these forms and sounds and colors and odors and sentiments a duplicate source of delight. But this mere repetition is not poetry. He who shall simply sing, with however glowing enthusiasm or with however vivid a truth of description, of the sights and sounds and odors and colors and sentiments which greet him in common with all mankind,-he, I say, has yet failed to prove his divine title. There is still a something in the distance which he has been unable to attain. We have still a thirst unquenchable, to allay which he has not shown us the crystal springs. This thirst belongs to the immortality of man. It is at once a consequence and an indication of his perennial existence. It is the desire of the moth for the star. It is no mere appreciation of the beauty before us, but a wild effort to reach the beauty above. Inspired by an ecstatic prescience of the glories beyond the grave, we struggle, by multiform combinations among the things and thoughts of time, to attain a portion of that loveliness whose very elements, perhaps, appertain to eternity alone. And thus when by poetry-or when by music, the most entrancing of the poetic moods-we find ourselves melted into tears, we weep then, not, as the Abbate Gravina supposes, through excess of pleasure, but through a certain petulant, impatient sorrow, at our inability to grasp now, wholly, here on earth, at once and forever, those divine and rapturous joys, of which through the poem or through the music, we attain to but brief and indeterminate glimpses. The struggle to apprehend the supernal loveliness, this struggle, on the part of souls fittingly consti tuted, has given to the world all that which it (the world) has ever been enabled at once to understand and to feel as poetic. The poetic sentiment, of course, may develop itself in various modes,-in painting, in sculpture, in architecture, in the dance, very especially in music, and very peculiarly, and with a wide field, in the composition of the landscape garden. Our present theme, however, has regard only to its manifestation in words. And here let me speak briefly on the topic of rhythm. Contenting myself with the certainty that music, in its various modes of metre, rhythm, and rhyme, is of so vast a moment in poetry as never to be wisely rejected, is so vitally important an adjunct that he is simply silly who declines its assistance, I will not now pause to maintain its absolute essentiality. It is in music, perhaps, that the soul most nearly attains the great end for which, when inspired by the poetic sentiment, it struggles, -the creation of supernal beauty. It may be, indeed, that here this sublime end is, now and then, attained, in fact. We are often made to feel, with a shivering delight, that from an earthly harp are stricken notes which can not have been unfamiliar to the angels. And thus there can be little doubt that in the union of poetry with music in its popular sense, we shall find the widest field for the poetic development. The old bards and minnesingers had advantages which we do not possess; and Thomas Moore, singing his own songs, was, in the most legitimate manner, perfecting them as poems. To recapitulate, then: I would define, in brief, the poetry of words as the rhythmical creation of beauty. Its sole arbiter is Taste. With the intellect or with the conscience, it has only collateral relations. Unless incidentally, it has no concern whatever either with Duty or with Truth. A few words, however, in explanation. That pleasure which is at once the most pure, the most elevating, and the most intense, is derived, I maintain, from the contemplation of the Beautiful. In the contemplation of Beauty, we alone find it possible to attain this pleasurable elevation or excitement of the soul which we recognize as the poetic sentiment, and which is so easily distinguished from Truth, which is the satisfaction of the Reason, or from Passion, which is the excitement of the heart. I make Beauty, therefore, using the word as inclusive of the sublime,—I make Beauty the province of the poem, simply because it is an obvious rule of art that effects should be made to spring as directly as possible from their causes,—no one as yet having been weak enough to deny that the peculiar elevation in question at least most readily attainable in the poem. It by no means follows, however, that the incitements of Passion or the precepts of Duty, or even the lessons of Truth, may not be introduced into a poem, and with advantage; for they may subserve, incidentally, in various ways, the general pur poses of the work: but the true artist will always contrive to tone them down in proper subjection to that Beauty which is the atmosphere and the real essence of the poem. I can not better introduce the few poems which I shall present for your consideration than by the citation of the proem to Mr. Longfellow's "Waif.” The day is done, and the darkness I see the lights of the village Gleam through the rain and the mist, A feeling of sadness and longing, As the mist resembles rain. Come, read to me some poem, Not from the grand old masters, Through the corridors of Time; For, like strains of martial music, And to-night I long for rest. |