The musical in sound is the sustained and continuous; the
musical in thought is the sustained and continuous also. There is a
near connection between music and deep-rooted passion. Mad people sing.
As often as articulation passes naturally into intonation, there poetry
begins. Where one idea gives a tone and colour to others, where one
feeling melts others into it, there can be no reason why the same
principle should not be extended to the sounds by which the voice
utters these emotions of the soul, and blends syllables and lines into
each other. It is to supply the inherent defect of harmony in the
customary mechanism of language, to make the sound an echo to the
sense, when the sense becomes a sort of echo to itself--to mingle the
tide of verse, "the golden cadences of poetry", with the tide of
feeling, flowing and murmuring as it flows--in short, to take the
language of the imagination from off the ground, and enable it to
spread its wings where it may indulge its own impulses:
Sailing with supreme dominion
Through the azure deep of air--
without being stopped, or fretted, or diverted with the abruptnesses
and petty obstacles, and discordant flats and sharps of prose, that
poetry was invented.
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