Poetry, in a general sense, may be defined to be “the expression of the
Imagination:” and poetry is connate with the origin of man. Man is an
instrument over which a series of external and internal impressions are driven,
like the alternations of an ever-changing wind over an Aeolian lyre, which move
it by their motion to ever-changing melody. But there is a principle with the
human being, and perhaps within all sentient being, which acts otherwise than
in the lyre, and produces not melody alone, but harmony, by an internal adjustment
of the sounds or motions thus excited to the impressions which excite them.
It is as if the lyre could accommodate its chords to the motions of that which
strikes them, in a determined proportion of sound; even as the musician can
accommodate his voice to the sound of the lyre. A child at play by itself will
express its delight by its voice and motions; and every inflexion of tone and
every gesture will bear exact relation to a corresponding antitype in the pleasurable
impressions which awakened it; it will be the reflected image of that impression;
and as the lyre trembles and sounds after the wind has died away, so the child
seeks, by prolonging in its voice and motions the duration of the effect, to
prolong also a consciousnes of the cause. In relation to the objects which delight
a child, these expressions are what poetry is to higher objects. The savage
(for the savage is to ages what the child is to years) expresses the emotions
produced in him by surrounding objects in a similar manner; and language and
gesture, together with plastic or pictorial imitation, become the image of the
combined effect of those objects, and of his apprehension of them. Man in society,
with all his passions and his pleasures, next becomes the object of the passions
and pleasures of man; and additional class of emotions produced an augmented
treasure of expressions; and language, gesture, and the imitative arts, become
at once the representation and the medium, the pencil and the picture, the chisel
and the statue, the chord and the harmony. The social sympathies, or those laws
from which as from its elements society results, begin to develop themselves
from the moment that two human beings coexist; the future is contained within
the present as the plant within the seed; and equality, diversity, unity, contrast,
mutual dependence, become the principles alone capable of affording the motives
according to which the will of a social being is determined to action, inasmuch
as he is social; and constitute pleasure in sensation, virtue in sentiment,
beauty in art, truth in reasoning, and love in the intercourse of kind. Hence
men, even in the infancy of society, observe a certain order in their words and
actions, distinct from that of the objects and the impressions represented by
them, all expression being subject to the laws of that from which it proceeds.
But let us dismiss those more general considerations which might involve an
inquiry into the principles of society itself, and restrict our view to the
manner in which the imagination is expressed upon its forms.