These similitudes or
relations are finely said by Lord Bacon to be "the same footsteps of
nature impressed upon the various subjects of the world" [Footnote:
_De Augment. Scient._, cap. I, lib. iii.]--and he considers the faculty
which perceives them as the storehouse of axioms common to all
knowledge. In the infancy of society every author is necessarily a
poet, because language itself is poetry; and to be a poet is to
apprehend the true and the beautiful; in a word, the good which exists
in the relation subsisting, first between existence and perception,
and secondly between perception and expression. Every original language
near to its source is in itself the chaos of a cyclic poem: the
copiousness of lexicography and the distinctions of grammar are the
works of a later age, and are merely the catalogue and the form of the
creations of poetry.
But poets, or those who imagine and express this indestructible order,
are not only the authors of language and of music, of the dance, and
architecture, and statuary, and painting: they are the institutors of
laws, and the founders of civil society, and the inventors of the arts
of life, and the teachers, who draw into a certain propinquity with
the beautiful and the true, that partial apprehension of the agencies
of the invisible world which is called religion.
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