plates the central identity, sees it undulate and roll this way and that, with divine flowings, through remotest things; and, following it, can detect essen tial resemblances in natures never before compared. He can class them so audaciously, because he is sensible of the sweep of the celestial stream, from which nothing is exempt. His own body is a flee ing apparition, — his personality as fugitive as the trope he employs. In certain hours we can almost pass our hand through our own body. I think the use or value of poetry to be the suggestion it affords of the flux or fugaciousness of the poet. The mind delights in measuring itself thus with matter, with history, and flouting both. A thought, any thought, pressed, followed, opened, dwarfs matter, custom, and all but itself. But this second sight does not necessarily impair the primary or common sense. Pindar and Dante, yes, and the gray and timeworn sentences of Zoroaster, may all be parsed, though we do not parse them. The poet has a logic, though it be subtile. He observes higher laws than he transgresses. " Poetry must first be good sense, though it is something better."
This union of first and second sight reads nature to the end of delight and of moral use. Men are imaginative, but not overpowered by it to the ex tent of confounding its suggestions with external facts. We live in both spheres, and must not mix them. Genius certifies its entire possession 20 POETRY AND IMAGINATION.
of its thought, by translating it into a fact which perfectly represents it, and is hereby education. Charles Jaines Fox thought " Poetry the great re freshment of the human mind, — the only thing, after all; that men first found out they had minds, by making and tasting poetry."
Man runs about restless and in pain when his condition or the objects about him do not fully match his thought. He wishes to be rich, to be old, to be young, that things may obey him. In the ocean, in fire, in the sky, in the forest, he finds facts adequate and as large as he. As his thoughts are deeper than he can fathom, so also are these. 'T is easier to read Sanscrit, to decipher the arrowhead character, than to interpret these familiar sights. 'T is even much to name them. Thus Thomson's " Seasons " and the best parts of many old and many new poets are simply enu merations by a person who felt the beauty of the common sights and sounds, without any at tempt to draw a moral or affix a meaning.
The poet discovers that what men value as sub stances have a higher value as symbols; that Xa- ture is the immense shadow of man. A man's action is only a picture-book of his creed He does after what he believes. Your condition, your employment, is the fable of you. The world is thoroughly anthropomorphized, as if it had passed through the body and mind of man, and taken his IMAGINATION. 21 IMAGINATION. 21 mould and form. Indeed, good poetry is always, personification, and heightens every species of force in nature by giving it a human volition. We are advertised that there is nothing to which he is not related; that everything is convertible into every other. The staff in this hand is the radius vector of the sun. The chemistry of this is the chemistry of that. Whatever one act we do, what ever one thing we learn, we are doing and learn ing all things, — marching in the direction of universal power. Every healthy mind is a true Alexander or Sesostris, building a universal mon archy.
The senses injprison us, and we help them with metres as limitary, — with a pair of scales and a foot-rule, and a clock. How long it took to find out what a day was, or what this sun, that makes days! It cost thousands of years only to make the motion of the earth suspected. Slowly, by compar ing thousands of observations, there dawned on some mind a theory of the sun, — and we found the astronomical fact. But the astronomy is in the mind: the senses affirm that the earth stands still and the sun moves. The senses collect the surface facts of matter. The intellect acts on these brute reports, and obtains from them results which are the essence or intellectual form of the experiences. It compares, distributes, generalizes, and uplifts them into its own sphere. It knows that these 22 POETRY AND IMAGINATION.
transfigured results are not the brute experiences, just as souls in heaven are not the red bodies they once animated. Many transfigurations have be fallen them. The atoms of the body were once nebulae, then rock, then loam, then corn, then chyme, then chyle, then blood; and now the be holding and co-energizing mind sees the same refin ing and ascent to the third, the seventh, or the tenth power of the daily accidents which the senses re port, and which make the raw material of knowl edge. It was sensatkm;' when memory came, it was experience; when mind acted, it was knowl edge; when mind acted on it as knowledge, it was thought.
This metonomy, or seeing the same sense in things so diverse, gives a pure pleasure. Every one of a million times we find a charm in the meta morphosis. It makes us dance and sing. All men are so far poets. When people tell me they do not relish poetry, and bring me Shelley, or Aikin's Poets, or I know not what volumes of rhymed English, to show that it has no charm, I am quite of their mind. But this dislike of the books only proves their liking of poetry. For they relish ^Esop, — cannot forget him, or not use him; bring them Homer's Iliad, and they like that; or the Cid, and that rings well: read to them.from Chau cer, and they reckon him an honest fellow. " Lear " and "Macbeth" and "Richard III." they know IMAGINATION. 23 IMAGINATION. 23 pretty well without guide. Give them Robin Hood's ballads, or " Griselda," or " Sir Andrew Bar ton/' or " Sir Patrick Spense," or " Chevy Chase," or " Tarn O'Shanter," and they like these well enough. They like to see statues; they like to name the stars; they like to talk and hear of Jove, Apollo, Minerva, Venus, and the Nine. See how tenacious we are of the old names. They like poetry without knowing it as such. They like to go to the theatre and be made to weep; to Faneuil Hall, and be taught by Otis, Webster, or Kossuth, or Phillips, what great hearts they have, what tears, what new possible enlargements to their narrow horizons. They like to see sunsets on the hills or on a lake shore. Now, a cow does not gaze at the rainbow, or show or affect any interest in the land scape, or a peacock, or the song of thrushes.
Nature is the true idealist. When she serves us best, when, on rare days, she speaks to the imagina tion, we feel that the huge heaven and earth are but a web drawn around us, that the light, skies, and mountains are but the painted vicissitudes of the soul. Who has heard our hymn in the churches without accepting the truth, — " As o'er otfr heads the seasons roll, And soothe with change of bliss the soul"?
Of course, when we describe man as poet, and credit him with the triumphs of the art, we speak of the potential or ideal man, — not found now in 24 POETRY AND IMAGINATION.
any one person. You must go through a city or a nation, and find one faculty here, one there, to build the true poet withal. Yet all men know the portrait when it is drawn, and it is part of religion to believe its possible incarnation.
He is the healthy, the wise, the fundamental, the manly man, seer of the secret; against all the ap pearance, he sees and reports the truth, namely, that the soul generates matter. And poetry is the only verity, — the expression of a sound mind speaking after the ideal, and not after the apparent. As a power, it is the perception of the symbolic character of things, and the treating them as rep resentative: as a talent, it is a magnetic tena- ciousness of an image, and by the treatment demonstrating that this pigment of thought is • as palpable and objective to the poet as is the ground on which he stands, or the walls of houses about him. And this power appears in Dante and Shak- speare. In some individuals this insight, or second sight, has an extraordinary reach which compels our wonder, as in Behmen, Swedenborg, and William Blake, the painter.
William Blake, whose abnormal genius, Words worth said, interested him more than the conver sation of Scott or of Byron, writes thus: " He who does not imagine in stronger and better linea ments, and in stronger and better Light than his perishing mortal eye can see, does not imagine IMAGINATION.. 25 at all. The painter of this work asserts that all his imaginations appear to him infinitely more per fect and more minutely organized, than anything seen by his mortal eye I assert for myself that I do not behold the outward creation, and that to me it would be a hindrance, and not action. I question not my corporeal eye any more than I would question a window concerning a sight. I look through it, and not with it."
'T is a problem of metaphysics to define the province of Fancy and Imagination. The words are often used, and the things confounded. Im agination respects the ca.use. It is the vision of an inspired soul reading arguments and affirmations in all nature of that which it is driven to say. But as soon as this soul is released a little from its passion, and at leisure plays with the resemblances and types for amusement, and not for its moral end, we call its action Fancy. Lear, mad with his affliction, thinks every man who suffers must have the like cause with his own. "What, have his daughters brought him to this pass? " But when, his attention being diverted, his mind rests from this thought, he becomes fanciful with Tom, play ing with the superficial resemblances of objects. Bunyan, in pain for his soul, wrote " Pilgrim's Progress "; Quarles, after he was quite cool, wrote " Emblems."
2G POETRY AND IMAGINATION.
Imagination is central; fancy, superficial. Fancy relates to surface, in which a great part of life lies. The lover is rightly said to fancy the hair, eyes, complexion of the maid. Fancy is a wilful, im agination a spontaneous act; fancy, a play as with dolls and puppets which we choose to call men and women; imagination, a perception and affirming of a real relation between a thought and some ma terial fact. Fancy amuses; imagination expands and exalts us. Imagination uses an organic classi fication. Fancy joins by accidental resemblance, surprises and amuses the idle, but is silent in the presence of great passion and action. Fancy aggre gates; imagination animates. Fancy is related to color; imagination, to form. Fancy paints; imagi nation sculptures.
Veracity. — I do not wish, therefore, to find that my poet is not partaker of the feast he spreads, or that he would kindle or amuse me with that which does not kindle or amuse him. He must believe in his poetry. Homer, Milton, Hafiz, Herbert, Sweden- borg, Wordsworth, are heartily enamored of their sweet thoughts. Moreover, they know that this correspondence of things to thoughts is far deeper than they can penetrate, — defying adequate expres sion; that it is elemental, or in the core of things. Veracity, therefore, is that which we require in poets, — that they shall say how it was with them, and VERACITY. 27 not what might be said. And the fault of our popular poetry is that it is not sincere.
" What news? " asks man of man everywhere. The only teller of news is the poet. When he sings, the world listens with the assurance that now a secret of God is to be spoken. The right poetic mood is or makes a more complete sensi bility, — piercing the outward fact to the meaning of the fact; shows a sharper insight: and the per ception creates the strong expression of it, as the man who sees his way walks in it.
'T is a rule in eloquence, that the moment the orator loses command of his audience, the audience commands him. So, in poetry, the master rushes to deliver his thought, and the words and 'images fly to him to express it; whilst colder moods are forced to respect the ways of saying it, and insinu ate, or, as it were, muffle the fact, to suit the poverty or caprice of their expression, so that they only hint the matter, or allude to it, being unable to fuse and mould their words and images to fluid obedi ence. See how Shakspeare grapples at once with the main problem of the tragedy, as in " Lear " and " Macbeth," and the opening of " The Merchant of Venice."
All writings must be in a degree exoteric, written to a human should or would, instead of to the fatal is: this holds even of the bravest and sincerest writers. Every writer is a skater, and must go 28 POETRY AND IMAGINATION.
partly where he would, and partly where the skates carry him; or a sailor, who can only land where sails can be blown. And yet it is to be added, that high poetry exceeds the fact, or nature itself, just as skates allow the good skater far more grace than his best walking would show, or sails more than riding. The poet writes from a real experience, the amateur feigns one. Of course, one draws the bow with his fingers, and the other with the strength of his body; one speaks with his lips, and the other with a chest voice. Talent amuses, but if your verse has not a necessary and autobiographic basis, though under whatever gay poetic veils, it shall not waste my time.
For poetry is faith. To the poet the world is virgin soil: all is practicable; the men are ready for virtue; it is always time to do right. He is a true re-commencer, or Adam in the garden again. He affirms the applicability of the ideal law to this moment and the present knot of affairs. Parties, lawyers, and men of the world will invariably dis pute such an application as romantic and danger ous: they admit the general truth, but they and their affair always constitute a case in bar of the statute. Free-trade, they concede, is very well as a principle, but it is never quite the time for its adop tion without prejudicing actual interests. Chas tity, they admit, is very well, — but then think of Mirabeau's passion and temperament! — Eternal VERACITY. 29 laws are very well, which admit no violation, — but so extreme were the times and manners of mankind, that you must admit miracles, — for the times constituted a case. Of course, we know what you say, that legends are found in all tribes, - but this legend is different. And so, throughout, the poet affirms the laws; prose busies itself with exceptions, — with the local and individual.
I require that the poem should impress me, so that after I have shut the book, it shall recall me to itself, or that passages should. And inestimable is the criticism of memory as a corrective to first impressions. We are dazzled at first by new words and brilliancy of color, which occupy the fancy and deceive the judgment. But all this is easily forgotten. Later, the thought, the happy image which expressed it, and which was a true experi ence of the poet, recurs to mind, and sends me •back in search of the book. And I wish that the poet should foresee this habit of readers, and omit all but the important passages. Shakspeare is made up of important passages, like Damascus steel made up of old nails. Homer has his own, — " One omen is good, to die for one's country "; and again, — " They heal their griefs, for curable are the hearts of the noble."
Write, that I may know you. Style betrays you, 30 POETRY AND IMAGINATION.
as your eyes do. We detect at once by it whether the writer has a firm grasp on his fact or thought, — exists at the moment for that alone, or whether he has one eye apologizing, deprecatory, turned on his reader. In proportion always to his posses sion of his thought is his defiance of his readers. There is no choice of words for him who clearly sees the truth. That provides him with the best word.
Great design belongs to a poem, and is better than any skill of execution, — but how rare! I find it in the poems of Wordsworth, — " Laodamia," and the " Ode to Dion," and the plan of " The Recluse." We want design, and do not forgive the bards if they have only the art of enamelling. We want an architect, and they bring us an upholsterer.
If your subject do not appear to you the flower of the world at this moment, you have not rightly chosen it. No matter what it is, grand or gay, national or private, if it has a natural prominence to you, work away until you come to the heart of it: then it will, though it were a sparrow or a spider-web, as fully represent the central law, and draw all tragic or joyful illustration, as if it were the book of Genesis or the book of Doom. The subject — wre must so often say it — is indifferent. Any word, every word in language, every circum stance, becomes poetic in the hands of a higher thought.
VERACITY. 31 The test or measure of poetic genius is the power to read the poetry of affairs, — to fuse the circumstance of to-day; not to use Scott's antique superstitions, or Shakspeare's, but to convert those of the nineteenth century, and of the existing na tions, into universal symbols. 'T is easy to re paint the mythology of the Greeks, or of the Catholic Church, the feudal castle, the crusade, the martyrdoms of medieval Europe; but to point out where the same creative force is now working in our own houses and public assemblies, to con vert the vivid energies acting at this hour, in New York and Chicago and San Francisco, into univer sal symbols, requires a subtile and commanding thought. 'T is boyish in Swedenborg to cumber himself with the dead scurf of Hebrew antiquity, as if the Divine creative energy had fainted in his own century. American life storms about us daily, and is slow to find a tongue. This contemporary in sight is transubstantiatiou, the conversion of daily bread into the holiest symbols; and every man would be a poet, if his intellectual digestion were perfect. The test of the poet is the power to take the passing day, with its news, its cares, its fears, as he shares them, and hold it up to a divine reason, till he sees it to have a purpose and beauty, and to be related to astronomy and history, and the eternal order of the world. Then the dry twig blossoms in his hand. He is calmed and elevated.
32 POETRY AND IMAGINATION.
The use of " occasional poems " is to give leave to originality. Every one delights in the felicity frequently shown in our drawing-rooms. In a game-party or picnic poem each writer is released from the solemn rhythmic traditions which alarm and suffocate his fancy, and the result is that one of the partners offers a poem in a new style that hints at a new literature. Yet the writer holds it cheap, and could do the like all day. On the stage, the farce is commonly far better given than the tragedy, as the stock actors understand the farce, and do not understand the tragedy. The writer in the parlor has more presence of mind, more wit and fancy, more play of thought, on the incidents that occur at table, or about the house, than in the poli tics of Germany or Eome. Many of the fine poems of Herrick, Jonson, and their contemporaries had this casual origin.
I know there is entertainment and room for tal ent in the artist's selection of ancient or remote subjects; as when the poet goes to India, or to Eome, or Persia, for his fable. But I believe no body knows better than he, that herein he consults his ease, rather than his strength or his desire. He is very well convinced that the great moments of life are those in which his own house, his own body, the tritest and nearest ways and words and things, have been illuminated into prophets and teachers. What else is it to be a poet? What are his gar- VERACITY. 33 VERACITY. 33 land and singing robes? What but a sensibility so keen that the scent of an elder-blow, or the timber-yard and corporation-works of a nest of pis mires is event enough for him, — all emblems and personal appeals to him. His wreath and robe is to do what he enjoys; emancipation from other men's questions, and glad study of his own; escape from the gossip and routine of society, and the allowed right and practice of making better. He does not give his hand, but in sign of giving his heart; he is not affable with all, but silent, uncommitted, or in love, as his heart leads him. There is no subject that does not belong to him, — politics, economy, manufactures, and stock-brokerage, as much as sun sets and souls; only, these things, placed in their true order, are poetry; displaced, or put in kitchen order, they are unpoetic. Malthus is the right organ of the English proprietors; but we 'shall never understand political economy, until Burns or Beranger or some poet shall teach it in songs, and he will not teach Malthusianism.
Poetry is the gai science. The trait and test of the poet is that he builds, adds, and affirms. The critic destroys: the poet says nothing but what helps somebody; let others be distracted with cares, he is exempt. All their pleasures are tinged with pain. All his pains are edged with pleasure. The gladness he imparts he shares. As one of the old Minnesingers sung, — 34 POETRY AND IMAGINATION.
" Oft have I heard, and now believe it true, "Whom man delights in, God delights in too."
Poetry is the consolation of mortal men. They live cabined, cribbed, confined, in a narrow and trivial lot, — in wants, pains, anxieties, and super stitions, in profligate politics, in personal animosi ties, in mean employments, — and victims of these; and the nobler powers untried, unknown. A poet comes, who lifts the veil; gives them glimpses of the laws of the universe; shows them the circum stance as illusion; shows that nature is only a language to express the laws, which are grand and beautiful, — and lets them, by his songs, into some of the realities. Socrates; the Indian teachers of the Maia; the Bibles of the nations; Shakspeare, Milton, Hafiz, Ossian, the Welsh Bards, — these all deal with nature and history as means and symbols, and not as ends. With such guides they begin to see that what they had called pictures are realities, and the mean life is pictures. And this is achieved by words; for it is a few oracles spoken by perceiving men that are the texts on which religions and states are founded. And this perception has at once its moral sequence. Ben Jonson said, "The principal end of poetry is to inform men in the just reason of living."
Creation. — But there is a third step which poetry takes, and which seems higher than the others, CREATION. 35 namely, creation, or ideas taking forms of their own, — when the poet invents the fable, and invents the language which his heroes speak. He reads in the word or action of the man its yet untold results. His inspiration is power to carry out and complete the metamorphosis, which, in the imperfect kinds, ar rested for ages, — in the perfecter, proceeds rapidly in the same individual. For poetry is science, and the poet a truer logician. Men in the courts or in the street think themselves logical, and the poet whimsical. Do they think there is chance or wil- fulness in what he sees and tells? To be sure, we demand of him what he demands of himself, — veracity, first of all. But with that, he is the law giver, as being an exact reporter of the essential law. He knows that he did not make his thought, — no, his thought made him, and made the sun and the stars. Is the solar system good art and architecture? the same wise achievement is in the human brain also, can you only wile it from inter ference and marring. "We cannot look at works of art but they teach us how near man is to creating. Michel Angelo is largely filled with the Creator that made and makes men. How much of the original craft remains in him, and he a mortal man! In him and the like perfecter brains the instinct is resistless, knows the right way, js melodious, and at all points divine. The reason we set so high a value on any poetry, — as often on a line or a 36 POETRY AND IMAGINATION.
phrase as on a poem, — is, that it is a new work of Nature, as a man is. It must be as new as foam and as old as the rock. But a new verse comes once in a hundred years; therefore Pindar, Hafiz, Dante, speak so proudly of what seems to the clown a jingle.
The writer, like the priest, must be exempted from secular labor. His work needs a frolic health; he must be at the top of his condition. In that prosperity he is sometimes caught up into a per ception of means and materials, of feats and fine arts, of fairy machineries and funds of power hith erto utterly unknown to him, whereby he can trans fer his visions to mortal canvas, or reduce them into iambic or trochaic, into lyric or heroic rhyme. These successes are not less admirable and astonish ing to the poet than they are to his audience. He has seen something which all the mathematics and the best industry could never bring him unto. Xow at this rare elevation above his usual sphere, he has come into new circulations, the marrow of the world is in his bones, the opulence of forms begins to pour into his intellect, and he is permitted to dip his brush into the old paint-pot with which birds, flowers, the human cheek, the living rock, the broad landscape, the ocean, and the eternal sky were painted.
These fine fruits of judgment, poesy, and senti ment, when once their hour is struck, and the world CKEATION. 37