He stared at the Pacific—and all his men
Looked at each other with a wild surmise—
Silent, upon a peak in Darien.”
CHAPTER VII.
POETRY.
Poetry is the flower of literature, the most perfect utterance of the human mind in no other of his works does man so nearly approach the Divine, so that in every age the poet has been regarded as the inspired mouthpiece of God. The prophet was the forth teller not merely the foreteller and his message commanded attention and respect as coming from a power above the speaker. Whatever may be said to the contrary there still remains the fact that the greatest and noblest thoughts which have ever occupied the mind of man have found their highest and most permanent expression in poetry, the outward form of which differing from the language of daily life is at once the accompaniment and indication of the dignity of a great idea.
Wordsworth calls poetry the breath and finer spirit of all knowledge. To the question, “What is a poet?” he replies, “He is a man speaking to men; a man, it is true, endowed with more lively sensibility, more enthusiasm and tenderness, who has a greater knowledge of human nature, and a more comprehensive Soul than are supposed to be common among mankind. To these qualities he has added a disposition to be affected more than other men by absent things as if they were present.”
Poetry is life crystalized into literature, its value is in its eternal truth, in its universal adaptation to the higher needs of our nature. It is because we find in poetry what we have observed but could not formulate for ourselves that it impresses us so deeply. George Eliot said of Wordsworth’s poems, “I never before met with so many of my own feelings expressed just as I should like them.” “There is some awe mixed with the joy of our surprise,” wrote Emerson, “when this poet, who lived in some past world, two or three hundred years ago, says that which lies close to my own Soul, that which I also had well-nigh thought and said.”
Lowell thought that the highest office of a great poet is to show us how much variety, freshness, and opportunity abides in the obvious and the familiar. Great poets have concentrated in their works the thought of an age. Gladstone says that the poems of Homer constitute a world of their own. “The study of him is not a mere matter of literary criticism, but is a full study of life in every one of its departments.” Poetry has somewhat the same relation to prose that a landscape painted by Corot bears to a photograph of the same scene. It is truth idealized. The poets teach us to admire beauties in nature that we have often looked at but never perceived. If it were not for Scott few people would know of Loch Katrine.
There is just as beautiful scenery elsewhere, but we are waiting for the poets to show it to us.
Sometimes the poets compress their observations of life and of the working of the spirit of man into words which embody a great truth in a little space. “Jewels five words long that on the stretch’d forefinger of all Time sparkle forever.” Often the poets produce an impression or make a picture by the use or a single appropriate word, as when Tennyson says the cloud smoulders on the cliff. He is master of the art of calling up mental images by allusions to color, sound and smell, and he carefully chooses from his enormous vocabulary the exact word to produce the desired effect.