An immortal instinct deep within the spirit of man is thus plainly a sense of the Beautiful.  This it is which administers to his delight in the manifold forms, and sounds, and odors, and sentiments amid which he exists.  And just as the lily is repeated in the lake, or the eyes of Amaryllis in the mirror, so is the mere oral or written repetition of these forms, and sounds, and colors, and odors, and sentiments a duplicate source of delight.  But this mere repetition is not poetry.  He who shall simply sing, with however glowing enthusiasm, or with however vivid a truth of description, of the sights, and sounds, and odors, and colors, and sentiments which greet him in common with all mankind—­he, I say, has yet failed to prove his divine title.  There is still a something in the distance which he has been unable to attain.  We have still a thirst unquenchable, to allay which he has not shown us the crystal springs.  This thirst belongs to the immortality of man.  It is at once a consequence and an indication of his perennial existence.  It is the desire of the moth for the star.  It is no mere appreciation of the Beauty before us, but a wild effort to reach the Beauty above.  Inspired by an ecstatic prescience of the glories beyond the grave, we struggle by multiform combinations among the things and thoughts of Time to attain a portion of that Loveliness whose very elements perhaps appertain to eternity alone.  And thus when by Poetry, or when by Music, the most entrancing of the poetic moods, we find ourselves melted into tears, we weep then, not as the Abbate Gravina supposes, through excess of pleasure, but through a certain petulant, impatient sorrow at our inability to grasp now, wholly, here on earth, at once and forever, those divine and rapturous joys of which through the poem, or through the music, we attain to but brief and indeterminate glimpses.

The struggle to apprehend the supernal Loveliness—­this struggle, on the part of souls fittingly constituted—­has given to the world all that which it (the world) has ever been enabled at once to understand and to feel as poetic.

The Poetic Sentiment, of course, may develop itself in various modes—­in Painting, in Sculpture, in Architecture, in the Dance—­very especially in Music—­and very peculiarly, and with a wide field, in the composition of the Landscape Garden.  Our present theme, however, has regard only to its manifestation in words.  And here let me speak briefly on the topic of rhythm.  Contenting myself with the certainty that Music, in its various modes of metre, rhythm, and rhyme, is of so vast a moment in Poetry as never to be wisely rejected—­is so vitally important an adjunct, that he is simply silly who declines its assistance, I will not now pause to maintain its absolute essentiality.  It is in Music perhaps that the soul most nearly attains the great end for which, when inspired by the poetic Sentiment, it struggles—­the creation of