se of the Beautiful. This it is which administers to his delight in
the manifold forms, and sounds, and odors, and sentiments amid which he
exists. And just as the lily is repeated in the lake, or the eyes of
Amaryllis in the mirror, so is the mere oral or written repetition of
these forms, and sounds, and colors, and odors, and sentiments a
duplicate source of delight. But this mere repetition is not poetry. He
who shall simply sing, with however glowing enthusiasm, or with however
vivid a truth of description, of the sights, and sounds, and odors, and
colors, and sentiments which greet him in common with all mankind--he, I
say, has yet failed to prove his divine title. There is still a
something in the distance which he has been unable to attain. We have
still a thirst unquenchable, to allay which he has not shown us the
crystal springs. This thirst belongs to the immortality of man. It is at
once a consequence and an indication of his perennial existence. It is
the desire of the moth for the star. It is no mere appreciation of the
Beauty before us, but a wild effort to reach the Beauty above. Inspired
by an ecstatic prescience of the glories beyond the grave, we struggle
by multiform combinations among the things and thoughts of Time to
attain a portion of that Loveliness whose very elements perhaps
appertain to eternity alone. And thus when by Poetry, or when by Music,
the most entrancing of the poetic moods, we find ourselves melted into
tears, we weep then, not as the Abbate Gravina supposes, through excess
of pleasure, but through a certain petulant, impatient sorrow at our
inability to grasp _now_, wholly, here on earth, at once and forever,
those divine and rapturous joys of which _through_ the poem, or
_through_ the music, we attain to but brief and indeterminate glimpses.

The struggle to apprehend the supernal Loveliness--this struggle, on the
part of souls fittingly constituted--has given to the world all _that_
which it (the world) has ever been enabled at once to understand and _to
feel_ as poetic.

The Poetic Sentiment, of course, may develop itself in various modes--in
Painting, in Sculpture, in Architecture, in the Dance--very especially
in Music--and very peculiarly, and with a wide field, in the composition
of the Landscape Garden. Our present theme, however, has regard only to
its manifestation in words. And here let me speak briefly on the topic
of rhythm. Contenting myself with the certainty that