"Thinkest thou," says Carlyle in "Past and Present," "there were no
poets till Dan Chaucer? No heart burning with a thought which it could
not hold, and had no word for; and needed to shape and coin a word
for--what thou callest a metaphor, trope, or the like? For every word we
have there was such a man and poet. The coldest word was once a glowing
new metaphor and bold questionable originality. Thy very ATTENTION, does
it not mean an _attentio_, a STRETCHING-TO? Fancy that act of the mind,
which all were conscious of, which none had yet named,--when this new
poet first felt bound and driven to name it. His questionable
originality and new glowing metaphor was found adoptable, intelligible,
and remains our name for it to this day."

All words, then, belonging to the inner world of the mind, are of the
imagination, are originally poetic words. The better, however, any such
word is fitted for the needs of humanity, the sooner it loses its poetic
aspect by commonness of use. It ceases to be heard as a symbol, and
appears only as a sign. Thus thousands of words which were originally
poetic words owing their existence to the imagination, lose their
vitality, and harden into mummies of prose. Not merely in literature
does poetry come first, and prose afterwards, but poetry is the source
of all the language that belongs to the inner world, whether it be of
passion or of metaphysics, of psychology or of aspiration. No poetry
comes by the elevation of prose; but the half of prose comes by the
"massing into the common clay" of thousands of winged words, whence,
like the lovely shells of by-gone ages, one is occasionally disinterred
by some lover of speech, and held up to the light to show the play of
colour in its manifold laminations.

For the world is--allow us the homely figure--the human being turned
inside out. All that moves in the mind is symbolized in Nature. Or, to