BOOK SECOND. THE NATURE OF POETRY. HERE again comes the old salutation, What is Poetry? Most persons think they know what it is well enough, but, if they try, they will find that they know it no better than Augustine knew Time: If you ask me, he says, what Time is, I cannot tell; but I know very well if you do not ask me. As though some wicked sphinx were the questioner, no sooner are we asked what poetry is than all poetry has fled, and is seen like the mirage far away behind us and before. I am in hopes that in treading this wilderness, the foregoing remarks will afford a clue, so that we may find our way to something like a sure and definite answer. Let it only be remembered that by poetry is meant poetic feeling, however it may have been awakened, whether at first-hand by contact with nature, or at second-hand by converse with a poet; and further let it be granted that, although we have only to do with the nature of inward feelings, we are allowed to discover these by referring to their objective expression in poesy. What kind of pleasure, then, is poetry? It strikes one at a glance that it is pleasure of a very high order of all mere earthly pleasures it is indeed the highest. There is, however, a more heavenly happiness. It hath not entered into the heart of man to conceive of bliss loftier than that ecstasy which fills the mind of the worshipper when in visionary hour he holds fellowship with God on high. Although this, our greatest joy, be not of needs poetic, we may still venture to say here what I shall afterwards endeavour to prove, that it is almost always attended by those activities which entitle it to the name of poetry. Its noblest title is that which it receives by charter of inspiration-Joy of the Holy Ghost; but it does not scorn the meaner title, and this title it shares with the very lowest of our pleasures. In days of chivalry, a king was not born a knight any more than a squire was: they had both to win their spurs. In like manner, neither the most spiritual nor the most sensuous pleasure is of itself poetry, but any and every pleasure may become so. Poetry has thus a very wide range: it embraces every pleasure of which man is capable, and gives it a peculiar tone; a tone with regard to which it will ever hold good, that of two minds enjoying the same thing, the one in poetic, the other in unpoetic mood, the former has a pleasure more refined, keener, better far than that which is felt by the latter. CHAPTER I. THE LAW OF IMAGINATION. BUT by the question, What kind of pleasure is poetry? we are at once launched into a consideration of the first law. For, as was remarked in closing the analysis of pleasure, the third law slides into the second, and both slide into the first, like the pieces of a telescope; so that to ask what kind of pleasure this or that may be, is simply to ask what may be the kind of its activity. In the present case, Shakspere will answer: "The lunatic, the lover, and the poet Are of imagination all compact." He speaks of three individuals having the same build; but there is not that difference between them which would enable us logically to divide them into three. They might all very well exist in one and the same person, like those three suns which Edward and Richard saw rise on the plain near Mortimer's Cross, and which were immediately afterwards resolved into one. As one and the same goddess was called Luna in heaven, |