The creations of sculpture, painting, and music
are illustrations still more decisive.
Language, colour, form, and religious and civil habits of action are
all the instruments and materials of poetry; they may be called poetry
by that figure of speech which considers the effect as a synonym of
the cause. But poetry in a more restricted sense expresses those
arrangements of language, and especially metrical language, which are
created by that imperial faculty, whose throne is curtained within the
invisible nature of man. And this springs from the nature itself of
language, which is a more direct representation of the actions and
passions of our internal being, and is susceptible of more various and
delicate combinations than colour, form, or motion, and is more plastic
and obedient to the control of that faculty of which it is the creation.
For language is arbitrarily produced by the imagination, and has
relation to thoughts alone; but all other materials, instruments, and
conditions of art have relations among each other, which limit and
interpose between conception and expression.
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