and conventional. Neither in the sounds themselves, which are the
voluntary signs of certain ideas, nor in their grammatical arrangements
in common speech, is there any principle of natural imitation, or
correspondence to the individual ideas, or to the tone of feeling with
which they are conveyed to others. The jerks, the breaks, the
inequalities, and harshnesses of prose, are fatal to the flow of a
poetical imagination, as a jolting road or a stumbling horse disturbs
the reverie of an absent man. But poetry makes these odds all even. It
is the music of language, answering to the music of the mind, untying as
it were "the secret soul of harmony." Wherever any object takes such a
hold of the mind as to make us dwell upon it, and brood over it, melting
the heart in tenderness, or kindling it to a sentiment of enthusiasm;--
wherever a movement of imagination or passion is impressed on the mind,
by which it seeks to prolong and repeat the emotion, to bring all other
objects into accord with it, and to give the same movement of harmony,
sustained and continuous, or gradually varied according to the occasion,
to the sounds that express it--this is poetry. The musical in sound is
the sustained and continuous; the musical in thought is the sustained
and continuous also. There is a near connection between music and
deep-rooted passion. Mad people sing. As often as articulation passes
naturally into intonation, there poetry begins. Where one idea gives a
tone and colour to others, where one feeling melts others into it, there
can be no reason why the same principle should not be extended to the
sounds by which the voice utters these emotions of the soul, and blends
syllables and lines into each other. It is to supply the inherent defect
of harmony in the customary mechanism of language, to make the sound an
echo to the sense, when the sense becomes a sort of echo to itself--to
mingle the tide of verse, "the golden cadences of poetry," with the tide
of feeling, flowing and murmuring as it flows--in short, to take the
language of the imagination from off the ground, and enable it to spread