ugh all men observe a similar, they observe
not the same order, in the motions of the dance, in the melody of the
song, in the combinations of language, in the series of their
imitations of natural objects. For there is a certain order or rhythm
belonging to each of these classes of mimetic representation, from
which the hearer and the spectator receive an intenser and purer
pleasure than from any other: the sense of an approximation to this
order has been called taste by modern writers. Every man in the
infancy of art observes an order which approximates more or less
closely to that from which this highest delight results: but the
diversity is not sufficiently marked, as that its gradations should be
sensible, except in those instances where the predominance of this
faculty of approximation to the beautiful (for so we may be permitted
to name the relation between this highest pleasure and its cause) is
very great. Those in whom it exists in excess are poets, in the most
universal sense of the word; and the pleasure resulting from the
manner in which they express the influence of society or nature upon
their own minds, communicates itself to others, and gathers a sort of
reduplication from that community. Their language is vitally
metaphorical; that is, it marks the before unapprehended relations of
things and perpetuates their apprehension, until the words which
represent them become, through time, signs for portions or classes of
thoughts instead of pictures of integral thoughts; and then if no new
poets should arise to create afresh the associations which have been
thus disorganized, language will be dead to all the nobler purposes of
human intercourse. These similitudes or relations are finely said by
Lord Bacon to be 'the same footsteps of nature impressed upon the
various subjects of the world';[10] and he considers the faculty
which perceives them as the storehouse of axioms common to all
knowledge. In the infancy of society every author is necessarily a
poet, because language itself is poetry; and to be a poet is to
apprehend the true and the beautiful, in a word, the good which exists
in the relation, subsisting, first between existence and perception,
and secondly between perception and expression. Every original
language near to its source is in itself the chaos of a cyclic poem:
the copiousness of lexicography and the distinctions of grammar are
the works of a later age, and are merely the catalogue and the f