nize the same truth. Metaphors, similes, hyperboles,
and personifications, are the poet's colours, which he has liberty to
employ almost without limit. We characterize as "poetical" the prose
which uses these appliances of language with any frequency, and condemn
it as "over florid" or "affected" long before they occur with the
profusion allowed in verse. Further, let it be remarked that in
brevity--the other requisite of forcible expression which theory points
out, and emotion spontaneously fulfils--poetical phraseology similarly
differs from ordinary phraseology. Imperfect periods are frequent;
elisions are perpetual; and many of the minor words, which would be
deemed essential in prose, are dispensed with.

Sec. 53. Thus poetry, regarded as a vehicle of thought, is especially
impressive partly because it obeys all the laws of effective speech,
and partly because in so doing it imitates the natural utterances of
excitement. While the matter embodied is idealized emotion, the vehicle
is the idealized language of emotion. As the musical composer catches
the cadences in which our feelings of joy and sympathy, grief and
despair, vent themselves, and out of these germs evolves melodies
suggesting higher phases of these feelings; I so, the poet develops from
the typical expressions in which men utter passion and sentiment, those
choice forms of verbal combination in which concentrated passion and
sentiment may be fitly presented.

Sec. 54. There is one peculiarity of poetry conducing much to its
effect--the peculiarity which is indeed usually thought its
characteristic one--still remaining to be considered: we mean its
rhythmical structure. This, improbable though it seems, will be found to
come under the same generalization with the others. Like each of them,
it is an idealization of the natural language of strong emotion, which
is known to be more or less metrical if the emotion be not too violent;
and like each of them it is an economy of the reader's or hearer's
attention. In the peculiar tone and manner we adopt in uttering
versified language, may be discerned its relationship to the feelings;
and the pleasure which its measured movement gives us, is ascribable
to the comparative ease with which words metrically arranged can be
recognized.

Sec. 55. This last position will scarcely be at once admitted; but a little
explanation will show its reasonableness. For if, as we have seen,
there is an expenditure of mental e