DefenceOfPoetry

The road, as we shall travel it, leads through half the lands and all the seven seas of the globe. For we shall meet on the way with as strange a concourse as ever haunted the slopes of Parnassus – with alligators and albatrosses and auroras and Antichthones; with biscuit worms, bubbles of ice, bassoons, and breezes; with candles, and Cain, and the Corpo Santo; Diocletian, king of Syria, and the dæmons of the elements; earthquakes and the Euphrates; frost needles, and fog smoke, and phosphorescent light; gooseberries and the Gordonia lasianthus, haloes and hurricanes, lightnings and Laplanders; meteors and the Old Man of the Mountain, and stars behind the moon; nightmares and the sources of the Nile; footless birds of Paradise, and the observatory at Pekin; swoons and spectres, and slimy seas; wefts, and water-snakes, and the Wandering Jew.

Poetry is the record of the best and happiest moments of the happiest and best minds. We are aware of evanescent visitations of thought and feeling sometimes associated with place or person, sometimes regarding our own mind alone, and always arising unforeseen and departing unbidden, but elevating and delightful beyond all expression: so that even in the desire and the regret they leave, there cannot but be pleasure, participating as it does in the nature of its object.

It is as it were the interpretation of a diviner nature through our own; but its footsteps are like those of a wind over the sea, which the coming calm erases, and whose traces remain only as on the wrinkled sand which paves it. These and corresponding conditions of being are experienced principally by those of the most delicate sensibility and the most enlarged imagination; and the state of mind produced by them is at war with every base desire. The enthusiasm of virtue, love, patriotism, and friendship is essentially linked with such emotions; and whilst they last, self appears as what it is, an atom to a universe. Poets are not only subject to these experiences as spirits of the most refined organisation, but they can

colour all that they combine with the evanescent hues of this ethereal world; a word, a trait in the representation of a scene or a passion will touch the enchanted chord, and reanimate, in those who have ever experienced these emotions, the sleeping, the cold, the buried image of the past. Poetry thus makes immortal all that is best and most beautiful in the world; it arrests the vanishing apparitions which haunt the interlunations of life, and veiling them, or in language or in form, sends them forth among mankind, bearing sweet news of kindred joy to those with whom their sisters abide – abide, because there is no portal of expression from the caverns of the spirit which they inhabit into the universe of things.

Poetry redeems from decay the visitations of the divinity in man.