Nor is it different in man, Nature’s crown triumphant. In throes of pain or woe’s distress; in joys that iris happy tears; in sorrow’s mournful cadences; in laughter’s lilting melody; in peace and bounteous plenty, or in war and woeful famine; in love or hate, or life or death;—through all of man’s existence, there again is rhythm, Passion’s only melody, the music of the soul.
True, in the calms of life, although ’tis there, we little feel this rhythm,—this adjusting process by which man inevitably seeks to put the heart in tune while here for higher harmonies hereafter. But when the soul’s deep feeling is aroused, then listen to its rhythmic ebb and flow like gently wimpling waters or like the surging beat, beat, beat upon the sands.
Hear the lonesome cadences of sorrow crying up to heaven; listen to the joyousness that tinkles through the melody of laughter; hark the sharp, quick, fierce beat in the surge of righteous anger; hear the tender, mellow music from the soothing lips of Love,—divine, immortal Love—and dream of other worlds and better things as you listen thus transported.
When these passions of the soul would express themselves in words, the words, too, fashioned by the spirit that enters them, must inevitably move in rhythm, and, in the greater wave-lengths, fit themselves to metre. This feeling, or passion, that enters rhythmic words—that unswervingly seeks rhythm as the only form in which it can express itself—is the spirit of poetry. Thus it is that poetry comes about; thus it is that poetry is spontaneous and not the result of long meditation; thus it is that poetry is the natural outlet of highly-wrought or great feeling.
SPIRIT.
As in man, so in all art of man, the soul within fashions the body without. True beauty is soul-beauty; that beauty that is in the heart and is felt by the heart, without which there can be no physical beauty.
Whatever in the world is beautiful, is beautiful just in proportion to the beauty of the soul that sees it. Thus if we would find beauty, we must first have it. The white-flecked blue of the skies of June; the wren or peewee pouring fourth its perfume-drunken melodies from among the apple-blossoms; the stretch of plain or towering height of mountain; the scenes of hill or valley, wood or meadow, lake or river; the Apollo Belvedere; the great Transfiguration; Paradise Lost;—nature’s various forms and reproductions—have no beauty to the heart whose cavities are empty. But to the full soul, the soul of beauty, they are perpetual springs of life, where Divinity is ever mirrored forth; for the soul gives what it gets, and gets what it gives, and the getting is proportioned to the giving. Give, and we get; keep, and we lose.
But what is it in an Apollo, a Transfiguration, a Paradise Lost that feeds this soul-hunger; that possesses this beauty?—The marble of the Apollo? Hard by lies the rough, unchiseled Parian marble; but it has no beauty.—The painted canvas of the Transfiguration? Sitting before it, there are yearly hundreds of canvases and brushes and paints and paintings; but they lack the beauty.—The words, the rhythm, the metre, the music of Paradise Lost? Millions of productions, from musty tomes in the British Museum to the upper left-hand corner of the “patent inside” of a newspaper, have all these; but no beauty.
What then? That same indefinable something which in man we call the soul, and in art, the spirit; that which the admiring soul instinctively feels and recognizes.