Fear is poetry, hope
is poetry, love is poetry, hatred is poetry; contempt, jealousy,
remorse, admiration, wonder, pity, despair, or madness, are all poetry.
Poetry is that fine particle within us, that expands, rarefies, refines,
raises our whole being: without it "man's life is poor as beast's".
Man is a poetical animal: and those of us who do not study the
principles of poetry, act upon them all our lives, like Moliere's
_Bourgeois Gentilhomme_, who had always spoken prose without knowing
it. The child is a poet, in fact, when he first plays at Hide-and-seek,
or repeats the story of Jack the Giant-killer; the shepherd-boy is a
poet when he first crowns his mistress with a garland of flowers; the
countryman, when he stops to look at the rainbow; the city apprentice,
when he gazes after the Lord Mayor's show; the miser, when he hugs his
gold; the courtier, who builds his hopes upon a smile; the savage, who
paints his idol with blood; the slave, who worships a tyrant; or the
tyrant, who fancies himself a god; the vain, the ambitious, the proud,
the choleric man, the hero and the coward, the beggar and the king,
the rich and the poor, the young and the old, all live in a world of
their own making; and the poet does no more than describe what all the
others think and act.
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