Human words being created breath, and breath being air in motion, prior to these language was impossible. And as the deaf are always dumb, language, like faith, comes by hearing. But hearing itself is a pensioner, waiting upon a speaker; consequently, it must ever be contingent on a cause alike antecedent and extrinsic of itself. It is, therefore, equally an oracle of reason and of faith that, however God may have communicated to angels, to man He spoke in articulate sounds, before man articulated a thought, a feeling, or an emotion of his soul. And as an emotional soul is but a harp of many strings, a hand there must have been to play upon its chords, before melody and harmony, twins-born of Heaven, had either a local habitation or a name.
But, it may be asked—Is there not in the regions of Poetry an æolian harp, found in the cave of Æolus, on which the winds of heaven played many a celestial symphony, without the skill or touch of human hand? Grant all that the Poetic Muse assumes, and then we ask—Who made the harp? And whence directed came the musing sylvan Zephyrus and his choir? Came they not from a land of images and dreams?
But we are inquiring for originals. Images and originals are the poles apart. An original without an image is possible; but an image without an original is alike impossible and inconceivable. Hence, alike philosophically and logically, we conclude that neither man nor angel addressed each other until they themselves had been addressed by their Creator. Then they intercommunicated thought, sentiment, and emotion with one another as God had communicated to them.
The mystery of language and Poetry is insoluble but on the admission of a revelation or communication of some sort, unconceived by the human mind, unexecuted by the human hand. If invention and creation be the grand characteristics of the Poet, Moses, if uninspired, was a greater Poet than Homer, or Milton, or Shakspeare, on the hypothesis that he invented the drama which he wrote. The first chapter of Genesis is the greatest and most splendid Poem ever conceived by human imagination, or written by human hand.
All Poets, ancient and modern, are mere plagiarists, if Moses was uninspired. We prove his Divine Legation by the intrinsic and transcendent merits of the Poem which he wrote. Imagination originates nothing absolutely new. It merely imitates and combines. It is regarded as the creative faculty of man; but its material is already furnished. The portrait of an unreal Adam is as conceivable as a child without a father, or an effect without a cause.
Thus we are obliged, by an inseparable necessity, to admit the credibility of the Poem which he wrote. And what does Moses say? Nothing more than that God spoke, and the universe was! This is the sublime of true Poetry. This is more than the logic of the proposition, God was, therefore we are! It is more than the philosophy, ex nihilo, nihil fit! or than, that nothing cannot be the parent of something.
But we must place our foot on a higher round of the ladder, before we can stand on such an eminence as to see, in all its fair proportions, the column on which the Muses perch themselves.
Job, and not Moses, shall be our guide, and the oracle alike of our reason and our imagination. But who is Job? There is not much poetry in the name, Job. But Rome and its vulgate vulgarized this hallowed name, and Britain followed Rome. His name in Chaldee, Syriac, and Arabic, is Jobab. There is more poetry in this. There is no metre, no poetry in a monotone or monosyllable. Born among rocks and mountains, the proper theatre of a heaven-inspired Muse—not in Arabia the Happy, but in Arabia the Rocky—he was a heart-touching, a soul-stirring, emotional Bard. In such a case the clouds that overshadow the era of the man only enhance the genius and inspiration of the Poet.
In internal and external evidence, according to our calendar of the Muses, he is the first-born of the Poets that yet survive the wasteful ravages of hoary Time. He sings not, indeed, of Chaos and Eternal Night. But as one inspired by a heaven-born Muse, he echoes the chorus of the Angelic Song, when on the utterance of the first fiat the Morning Stars sang together and all the sons of God shouted for joy. Hence we argue, that Poetry is not only prior to prose, but that language, its intellectual and emotional embodiment, is heaven-conceived, and heaven-born.
But in a short essay it would be out of place and in bad taste to attempt a discourse upon the broad field of ancient or modern Poetry. We merely attempt to suggest one idea on this rich and lofty theme. Our radical conception of the essential and differential attribute of Poetry, as contradistinguished from prose, however chaste, pure, beautiful, and philosophic, is not mere art, nor science, but creation.