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.

then, is poetry?

What kind of pleasure,

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,

Diana on earth, and Hecate in the shades below, so one and the same man is loftily hailed a poet, is called in commonplace a lover, and is damned by the name of a lunatic.

But it is not necessary to prove that imagination is the kind of activity belonging to poetry: the fact is unquestioned. By imagination Stewart and some others understand the faculty which looks to the possible but unknown—as a hippogriff—what the schools called beings of reason, entia rationis; and the mirror of the real they have called, in defiance of philosophic usage, conception. Imagination is in these pages employed with the double meaning-as the faculty which represents every show possible to sense, the productive and the reproductive Logos.

Although warmth of imagination is the mark by which poetry has ever and everywhere been distinguished from other pleasure, an objection to this doctrine very naturally arises; and we ought to determine precisely how we are to understand it. Imagination either enters into or plays about every word that we utter, and almost every thought that we think. The shows of the sensuous world fall upon the mind, like oil dropt upon water, to spread a film of glorious colouring on the surface of every thought and every feeling. It may therefore be objected that imagination belongs in no especial manner to poetic apart from other pleasure; and that the only difference in this respect is one of

degree. Imagination mingles with every pleasure, but the largest share goes to poetry. This is true; but it is not the less true that a difference of degree will often in a certain sense constitute a difference of kind. Add a little warmth and ice will become water; a little more heat will turn the water into steam. Thus will a mere increase of imagination thaw the most stubborn reason, melt the hardest prose, and make it flow forth in song; and thus, too, might we speak of genius as different from talent. There is, of course, no authoritative means of ascertaining-by measure, by weight or by tale—the exact amount of imagination that renders pleasure poetic: each mind, each country, as every atmosphere, every climate, has a standard of its own. And every pleasure, too, has a degree of its own at which it becomes poetry, just as ice, glass, and iron have each a degree at which they melt. Not to carry the comparison further, I will only add, that as some things in nature are always found fluid, so certain moods of the mind, such as love and feeling generally, contain so much imagination as to be almost always poetic. Love, whatever its kind, is the staple of our daily and homebred poetry. For as the opposite affections are owing to a want of faith, so love bursts from the fulness of faith, and faith itself is the ripe fruit of a strong and full-blown imagination-hope.

Imagination is the most stirring faculty that we have. Hobbes but a very little overshoots the mark when he