now pause to maintain its absolute essentiality. It is in Music perhaps
that the soul most nearly attains the great end for which, when inspired
by the Poetic Sentiment, it struggles -- the creation of supernal Beauty.
It _may _be, indeed, that here this sublime end is, now and then, attained
in _fact. _We are often made to feel, with a shivering delight, that from
an earthly harp are stricken notes which _cannot _have been unfamiliar to
the angels. And thus there can be little doubt that in the union of Poetry
with Music in its popular sense, we shall find the widest field for the
Poetic development. The old Bards and Minnesingers had advantages which we
do not possess -- and Thomas Moore, singing his own songs, was, in the
most legitimate manner, perfecting them as poems.

To recapitulate then: -- I would define, in brief, the Poetry of words
as _The Rhythmical Creation of Beauty. _Its sole arbiter is Taste. With
the Intellect or with the Conscience it has only collateral relations.
Unless incidentally, it has no concern whatever either with Duty or with
Truth.

A few words, however, in explanation. _That _pleasure which is at once
the most pure, the most elevating, and the most intense, is derived, I
maintain, from the contemplation of the Beautiful. In the contemplation of
Beauty we alone find it possible to attain that pleasurable elevation, or
excitement _of the soul, _which we recognize as the Poetic Sentiment, and
which is so easily distinguished from Truth, which is the satisfaction of
the Reason, or from Passion, which is the excitement of the heart. I make
Beauty, therefore--using the word as inclusive of the sublime -- I make
Beauty the province of the poem, simply because it is an obvious rule of
Art that effects should be made to spring as directly as possible from
their causes: -- no one as yet having been weak enough to deny that the
peculiar elevation in question is at least _most readily _attainable in