Si Ton n'y veille, elle ira jusqu'ou?

. . . .

De la musique encore et toujours!
Que ton vers soit la chose envolee
Qu'on sent qui fuit d'une ame allee
Vers d'autres cieux a d'autres amours.

Que ton vers soit la bonne aventure
Eparse au vent crispe du matin
Qui va fleurant la menthe et le thym . . .
Et tout le reste est litterature.

Yes; that is the sigh which goes up from one's heart, in these days
when there is so much verse and so little poetry;--"et tout le reste est
litterature"!

Clever imagery, humorous realism, philosophical thoughts, bizarre
fancies and strange inventions--it is all vivid, all arresting, all
remarkable, but it is only literature! This is a fine original image.
That is a fine unexpected thought. Here indeed is a rare magical
phrase. Good! We are grateful for these excellent things. But poetry?
Ah! that is another matter.

This music of which I speak is a large and subtle thing. It is not only
the music of syllables. It is the music of thoughts, of images, of
memories, of associations, of spiritual intimations and far-drawn
earth-murmurs. It is the music which is hidden in reality, in the heart
of reality; it is the music which is the secret cause why things are as
they are; the music which is their end and their beginning; it is the
old deep Pythagorean mystery; it is the music of the flowing tides,
of the drifting leaves, of the breath of the sleepers, of the passionate
pulses of the lovers; it is the music of the rhythm of the universe,
and its laws are the laws of sun and moon and night and day and
birth and death and good and evil.

Such music is itself, in a certain deep and true sense, more instinct
with the mystery of existence than any definite image or any definite
thought can possibly be. It seems to contain in it the potentiality of
all thoughts, and to stream in upon us from some Platonic
"beyond-world" where the high secret archetypes of all created forms
sleep intheir primordial simplicity.

The rhythmic cadences of such music seem, if I dare so far to put
such a matter into words, to exist independently of and previously to
the actual thoughts and images in which they are finally incarnated.

One has the sense that what the poet first feels is the obscure beauty
of this music, rising up wordless and formless from the
unfathomable wells of being, and that it is only afterwards, in a
mood of quiet recollection, that he fi