sounds by which the voice utters these emotions of the soul, and blends syllables and lines into each other.  It is to supply the inherent defect of harmony in the customary mechanism of language, to make the sound an echo to the sense, when the sense becomes a sort of echo to itself—­to mingle the tide of verse, “the golden cadences of poetry,” with the tide of feeling, flowing and murmuring as it flows—­in short, to take the language of the imagination from off the ground, and enable it to spread its wings where it may indulge its own impulses—­

      “Sailing with supreme dominion
      Through the azure deep of air—­”

without being stopped, or fretted, or diverted with the abruptnesses and petty obstacles, and discordant flats and sharps of prose, that poetry was invented.  It is to common language, what springs are to a carriage, or wings to feet.  In ordinary speech we arrive at a certain harmony by the modulations of the voice:  in poetry the same thing is done systematically by a regular collocation of syllables.  It has been well observed, that every one who declaims warmly, or grows intent upon a subject, rises into a sort of blank verse or measured prose.  The merchant, as described in Chaucer, went on his way “sounding always the increase of his winning.”  Every prose-writer has more or less of rhythmical adaptation, except poets, who, when deprived of the regular mechanism of verse, seem to have no principle of modulation left in their writings.

An excuse might be made for rhyme in the same manner.  It is but fair that the ear should linger on the sounds that delight it, or avail itself of the same brilliant coincidence and unexpected recurrence of syllables, that have been displayed in the invention and collocation of images.  It is allowed that rhyme assists the memory; and a man of wit and shrewdness has been heard to say, that the only four good lines of poetry are the well known ones which tell the number of days in the months of the year.

      “Thirty days hath September,” &c.

But if the jingle of names assists the memory, may it not also quicken the fancy? and there are other things worth having at our fingers’ ends, besides the contents of the almanac.—­Pope’s versification is tiresome, from its excessive sweetness and uniformity.  Shakspeare’s blank verse is the perfection of dramatic dialogue.

All is not poetry that passes for such:  nor does verse make the whole difference between poetry and prose.  The Iliad does not cease to be poetry in a literal translation; and Addison’s Campaign has been very properly denominated a Gazette in rhyme.  Common prose differs from poetry, as treating for the most part either of such trite, familiar, and irksome matters of fact, as convey no extraordinary impulse to the imagination, or else of such difficult and laborious processes of the understanding, as do not admit of the wayward or violent movements either of the imagination or the passions.