lay 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 consciousness 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; an
additional class of emotions produces 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.

In the youth of the world, men dance and sing and imitate natural
objects, observing in these actions, as in all others, a certain
rhythm or order. And, altho