patience with which a hen sits on her eggs; the
loyalty which a dog shows to his master--what thoughts may not all these
instincts involve, which it needs only a medium of communication to
translate into poetry?

Man, though with less wholeness of soul, enacts the same dramas. He
hears voices on all occasions; he incorporates what little he observes
of nature into his verbal dreams; and as each new impulse bubbles to the
surface he feels himself on the verge of some inexpressible heaven or
hell. He needs but to abandon himself to that seething chaos which
perpetually underlies conventional sanity--a chaos in which memory and
prophecy, vision and impersonation, sound and sense, are inextricably
jumbled together--to find himself at once in a magic world,
irrecoverable, largely unmeaning, terribly intricate, but, as he will
conceive, deep, inward, and absolutely real. He will have reverted, in
other words, to crude experience, to primordial illusion. The movement
of his animal or vegetative mind will be far from delightful; it will be
unintelligent and unintelligible; nothing in particular will be
represented therein; but it will be a movement in the soul and for the
soul, as exciting and compulsive as the soul's volume can make it. In
this muddy torrent words also may be carried down; and if these words
are by chance strung together into a cadence, and are afterwards written
down, they may remain for a memento of that turbid moment. Such words we
may at first hesitate to call poetry, since very likely they are
nonsense; but this nonsense will have some quality--some rhyme or
rhythm--that makes it memorable (else it would not have survived); and
moreover the words will probably show, in their connotation and order,
some sympathy with the dream that cast them up. For the man himself, in
whom such a dream may be partly recurrent, they may consequently have a
considerable power of suggestion, and they may even have it for others,
whenever the rhythm and incantation avail to plunge them also into a
similar trance.

[Sidenote: Rudimentary poetry an incantation or charm.]

Memorable nonsense, or sound with a certain hypnotic power, is the
really primitive and radical form of poetry. Nor is such poetry yet
extinct: children still love and compose it and every genuine poet, on
one side of his genius, reverts to it from explicit speech. As all
language has acquired its meaning, and did not have it in the beginning,
so the man wh