For though
the origin of most of our words is forgotten, each word was at first
a stroke of genius, and obtained currency because for the moment
it symbolized the world to the first speaker and to the hearer. The
etymologist finds the deadest word to have been once a brilliant
picture. Language is fossil poetry. As the limestone of the continent
consists of infinite masses of the shells of animalcules, so language
is made up of images or tropes, which now, in their secondary use, have
long ceased to remind us of their poetic origin. But the poet names the
thing because he sees it, or comes one step nearer to it than any other.
This expression or naming is not art, but a second nature, grown out
of the first, as a leaf out of a tree. What we call nature is a certain
self-regulated motion or change; and nature does all things by her own
hands, and does not leave another to baptize her but baptizes herself;
and this through the metamorphosis again. I remember that a certain poet
described it to me thus:

Genius is the activity which repairs the decays of things, whether
wholly or partly of a material and finite kind. Nature, through all her
kingdoms, insures herself. Nobody cares for planting the poor fungus; so
she shakes down from the gills of one agaric countless spores, any one
of which, being preserved, transmits new billions of spores to-morrow or
next day. The new agaric of this hour has a chance which the old one had
not. This atom of seed is thrown into a new place, not subject to the
accidents which destroyed its parent two rods off. She makes a man;
and having brought him to ripe age, she will no longer run the risk of
losing this wonder at a blow, but she detaches from him a new self, that
the kind may be safe from accidents to which the individual is exposed.
So when the soul of the poet has come to ripeness of thought, she
detaches and sends away from it its poems or songs,--a fearless,
sleepless, deathless progeny, which is not exposed to the accidents of
the weary kingdom of time; a fearless, vivacious offspring, clad with
wings (such was the virtue of the soul out of which they came) which
carry them fast and far, and infix them irrecoverably into the hearts
of men. These wings are the beauty of the poet's soul. The songs, thus
flying immortal from their mortal parent, are pursued by clamorous
flights of censures, which swarm in far greater numbers and threaten to
devour them; but these last are not winged