Many people suppose
that poetry is something to be found only in books, contained in lines
of ten syllables with like endings: but wherever there is a sense of
beauty, or power, or harmony, as in the motion of a wave of the sea,
in the growth of a flower that "spreads its sweet leaves to the air,
and dedicates its beauty to the sun",--_there_ is poetry, in its birth.
If history is a grave study, poetry may be said to be a graver: its
materials lie deeper, and are spread wider. History treats, for the
most part, of the cumbrous and unwieldy masses of things, the empty
cases in which the affairs of the world are packed, under the heads
of intrigue or war, in different states, and from century to century:
but there is no thought or feeling that can have entered into the mind
of man, which he would be eager to communicate to others, or which
they would listen to with delight, that is not a fit subject for poetry.
It is not a branch of authorship: it is "the stuff of which our life
is made". The rest is "mere oblivion", a dead letter: for all that is
worth remembering in life is the poetry of it.
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