Music, in its
various modes of metre, rhythm, and rhyme, is of so vast a moment in
Poetry as never to be wisely rejected--is so vitally important an
adjunct, that he is simply silly who declines its assistance, I will not
now pause to maintain its absolute essentiality. It is in Music perhaps
that the soul most nearly attains the great end for which, when inspired
by the poetic Sentiment, it struggles--the creation of supernal Beauty.
It _may_ be, indeed, that here this sublime end is, now and, then,
attained in _fact._ We are often made to feel, with a shivering delight,
that from an earthly harp are stricken notes which _cannot_ have been
unfamiliar to the angels. And thus there can be little doubt that in the
union of Poetry with Music in its popular sense, we shall find the
widest field for the Poetic development. The old Bards and Minnesingers
had advantages which we do not possess--and Thomas Moore, singing his
own songs, was, in the most legitimate manner, perfecting them as poems.

To recapitulate then:--I would define, in brief, the Poetry of words as
_The Rhythmical Creation of Beauty._ Its sole arbiter is Taste. With the
Intellect or with the Conscience it has only collateral relations.
Unless incidentally, it has no concern whatever either with Duty or with
Truth.

A few words, however, in explanation. _That_ pleasure which is at once
the most pure, the most elevating, and the most intense, is derived, I
maintain, from the contemplation of the Beautiful. In the contemplation
of Beauty we alone find it possible to attain that pleasurable
elevation, or excitement _of the soul_, which we recognize as the Poetic
Sentiment, and which is so easily distinguished from Truth, which is the
satisfaction of the Reason, or from Passion, which is the excitement of
the heart. I make Beauty, therefore--using the word as inclusive of the
sublime--I make Beauty the province of the poem, simply because it is an
obvious rule of Art that effects should be made to spring as directly as
possible from their causes:--no one as yet having been weak enough to
deny that the peculiar elevation in question is at least _most readily_
attainable in the poem. It by no means follows, however, that the
incitements of Passion, or the precepts of Duty, or even the lessons of
Truth, may not be introduced into a poem, and with advantage; for they
may subserve incidentally, in various ways, the general purposes of the
work: but the true artist wi