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Reason And Imagination Essay Research Paper According (стр. 3 из 4)

office and character of a poet participates in the divine nature as regards

providence no less than as regards creation.

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?133 Civil war, the spoils of Asia, and the fatal predominance first of the

Macedonian, and then of the Roman arms were so many symbols of the extinction or

suspension of the creative faculty in Greece. ?134 The bucolic writers who found

patronage under the lettered tyrants of Sicily and Œgypt were the latest

representatives of its most glorious reign. ?135 Their poetry is intensely

melodious; like the odour of the tuberose it overcomes and sickens the spirit

with excess of sweetness; whilst the poetry of the preceding age was as a

meadow-gale of June which mingles the fragrance of all the flowers of the field

and adds a quickening and harmonizing spirit of its own which endows the sense

with a power of sustaining its extreme delight. ?136 The bucolic and erotic

delicacy in written poetry is correlative with that softness in statuary, music,

and the kindred arts, and even in manners and institutions which distinguished

the epoch to which we now refer. ?137 Nor is it the poetical faculty itself or

any misapplication of it to which this want of harmony is to be imputed. ?138 An

equal sensibility to the influence of the senses |&| the affections is to be

found in the writings of Homer and Sophocles. ?139 the {{Sig. 8r}} former

especially has clothed sensual and pathetic images with irresistible

attractions. ?140 Their superiority over these succeeding writers consists in

the presence of those thoughts which belong to the inner faculties of our

nature, not in the absence of those which are connected with the external: their

incomparable perfection consists in a harmony of the union of all. ?141 lt is

not what the erotic poets have, but what they have not, in which their

imperfection consists. ?142 It is not inasmuch as they were Poets, but inasmuch

as they were not Poets, that they can be considered with any plausibility as

connected with the corruption of their age. ?143 Had that corruption availed so

as to extinguish in them the sensibility to pleasure, passion and natural

scenery, which is imputed to them as an imperfection, the last triumph of evil

would have been atchieved. ?144 For the end of social corruption is to destroy

all sensibility to pleasure; and therefore it is corruption. ?145 It begins at

the imagination and the intellect as at the core, and distributes itself thence

as a paralyzing venom, through the affections into the very appetites, until all

become a torpid mass in which hardly sense survives. ?146 At the approach of

such a period, Poetry ever addresses itself to those faculties which are the

last to be destroyed, and its voice is heard, like the foot steps of Astr?a,

departing from the world. ?147 Poetry ever communicates all the pleasure which

men are capable of receiving: it is ever still the light of life; the source of

whatever beautiful, or generous, or true can have place in an evil time. ?148 It

will readily [[be]] confessed that those among the luxurious citizens of

Syracuse and Alexandria who were delighted with the poems of Theocritus were

less cold, cruel and sensual than the remnant of their tribe. ?149 But

corruption must utterly have destroyed the fabric of human society before Poetry

can ever cease. ?150 The sacred links of that chain have never been entirely

disjoined, which descending through the minds of many men is attached to those

great minds whence as from a magnet the invisible effluence is sent forth which

at once connects, animates and sustains the life of all. ?151 It is the faculty

which contains within itself the seeds at once of its own and of social

renovation. ?152 And let us not circumscribe the effects of the bucolic and

erotic poetry within the limits of the sensibility of those to whom it was

addressed. ?153 They may have perceived the beauty {{Sig. 8v}} of these immortal

compositions, simply as fragments and isolated portions: those who are more

finely organized, or born in a happier age, may recognize them as episodes to

that great poem, which all poets like the co-operating thoughts of one great

mind have built up since the beginning of the world.

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?154 The same revolutions within a narrower sphere had place in Antient Rome:

but the actions and forms of its social life never seem to have been perfectly

saturated with the poetical element. ?155 The Romans appear to have considered

the Greeks as the selectest treasuries of the selectest forms of manners and of

nature and to have abstained from creating in measured language, sculpture,

music or architecture any thing which might bear a particular relation to their

own condition whilst it should bear a general one to the universal constitution

of the world. ?156 But we judge from partial evidence, and we judge perhaps

partially. ?157 Ennius, Varro, Pacuvius and Accius, all great poets, have been

lost. ?158 Lucretius is in the highest, and Virgil in a very high sense, a

creator. ?00 The chosen delicacy of the expressions of the latter are as a mist

of light which conceal from us the intense and exceeding truth of his

conceptions of nature. ?159 Livy is instinct with poetry. ?00 Yet Horace,

Catullus, Ovid, and generally the other great writers of the Virgilian age, saw

man and nature in the mirror of Greece. ?160 The institutions also and the

religion of Rome were less poetical than those of Greece, as the shadow is less

vivid than the substance. ?161 Hence Poetry in Rome seemed to follow rather than

accompany the perfection of political and domestic society. ?162 The true Poetry

of Rome lived in its [[institutions]] instituons; for whatever of beautiful,

true and majestic they contained could have sprung only from the faculty which

creates the order in which they consist. ?163 The life of Camillus; the death of

Regulus; the expectation of the senators in their godlike state of the

victorious Gauls; the refusal of the republic to make peace with Hannibal after

the battle of Cann?, were not the consequences of a refined calculation of the

probable personal advantage to result from such a rhythm and order in the shews

of life, to those who were at once the poets and the actors of these im{{Sig.

9r}} mortal dramas. ?164 The imagination beholding the beauty of this order,

created it out of itself according to its own idea: the consequence was empire,

and the reward everliving fame. ?165 These things are not the less poetry quia

carent vate sacro {{i.e., “because they lack a sacred poet”}}. They are the

episodes of that cyclic poem written by Time upon the memories of men. ?166 The

Past, like an inspired rhapsodist, fills the theatre of everlasting generations

with their harmony.

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?167 At length the antient system of religion and manners had [[fulfilled]]

fufilled the circle of its revolutions. ?168 And the world would have fallen

into utter anarchy and darkness, but that there were found poets among the

authors of the Christian and Chivalric systems of manners and religion, who

created forms of opinion and action never before conceived; which copied into

the imaginations of men became as generals to the bewildered armies of their

thoughts. ?169 It is foreign to the present purpose to touch upon the evil

produced by these systems: except that we protest, on the ground of the

principles already established, that no portion of it can be attributed to the

poetry they contain.

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?170 It is probable that the poetry of Moses, Job, David, Solomon and Isaiah had

produced a great effect upon the mind of Jesus and his disciples. ?171 The

scattered fragments preserved to us by the biographers of this extraordinary

person, are all instinct with the most vivid poetry. ?172 But his doctrines seem

to have been quickly distorted. ?173 At a certain period after the prevalence of

a system of opinions founded upon those promulgated by him, the three forms into

which Plato had distributed the faculties of mind underwent a sort of

apotheosis, and became the object of the worship of the civilised world. ?174

Here it is to be confessed that — “Light seems to thicken,[["]] {{Shakespeare,

Macbeth III.ii.50-53.}}

the crow makes wing to the rooky wood,

Good things of day begin to droop and drowze

And nights black agents to their preys do rouze.

{{Shakespeare, Macbeth III.ii.50-53}}

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?175 But mark how beautiful an order has sprung from the dust and blood of this

fierce chaos! ?176 how the World, as from a resurrection, balancing itself on

the golden wings of knowledge and of hope, has reassumed its yet unwearied

flight into the Heaven of time! ?177 Listen to {{Sig. 9v}} the music, unheard by

outward ears, which is as a ceaseless and invisible wind nourishing its

everlasting course with strength and swiftness.

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?178 The poetry in the doctrines of Jesus Christ, and the mythology and

institutions of the Celtic conquerors of the Roman Empire, out lived the

darkness and the convulsions connected with their growth and victory, and

blended themselves into a new fabric of manners and opinions. ?179 It is an

error to impute the ignorance of the dark ages to the Christian doctrines or to

the predominance of the Celtic nations. ?180 Whatever of evil their agencies may

have contained sprung from the extinction of the poetical principle, connected

with the progress of despotism and superstition. ?181 Men, from causes too

intricate to be here discussed, had become insensible and selfish: their own

will had become feeble and yet they were its slaves, and thence the slaves of

the will of others: lust, fear, avarice, cruelty and fraud characterised a race

amongst whom no one was to be found capable of creating in form, language or

institution. ?182 The moral anomalies of such a state of society are not justly

to be charged upon any class of events immediately connected with them, and

those events are most entitled to our approbation which could dissolve it most

expeditiously. ?183 It is unfortunate for those who cannot distinguish words

from thoughts that many of these anomalies have been incorporated into our

popular religion.

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?184 It was not until the eleventh century that the effects of the poetry of the

Christian and the Chivalric systems began to manifest them selves. ?185 The

principle of equality had been discovered and applied by Plato in his republic,

as the theoretical rule of the mode in which the materials of pleasure and of

power produced by the common skill and labour of human beings ought to be

distributed among them. ?186 The limitations of this rule were asserted by him

to be determined only by the sensibility of each, or the utility to result to

all. ?187 Plato, following the doctrines of Tim?us and Pythagoras, taught also a

moral and intellectual system of doctrine comprehending at once the past, the

present and the future condition of man. ?188 Jesus Christ divulged the sacred

and eternal truths contained in these views to mankind, and Christianity, in its

abstract purity, became {{Sig. 10r}} the exoteric expression of the esoteric

doctrines of the poetry and wisdom of antiquity. ?189 The incorporation of the

Celtic nations with the exhausted population of the South, impressed upon it the

figure of the poetry existing in their mythology and institutions. ?190 The

result was a sum of the action and reaction of all the causes included in it;

for it may be assumed as a maxim that no nation or religion can supersede any

other without incorporating into itself a portion of that which it supersedes.

?191 The abolition of personal and domestic slavery, and the emancipation of

women from a great part of the degrading restraints of antiquity were among the

consequences of these events.

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?192 The abolition of personal slavery is the basis of the highest political

hope that it can enter into the mind of man to conceive. ?193 The freedom of

women produced the poetry of sexual love. ?194 Love became a religion, the idols

of whose worship were ever present. ?00 It was as if the statues of Apollo, and

the muses had been endowed with life and motion and had walked forth among their

worshippers; so that earth became peopled by the inhabitants of a diviner world.

?195 The familiar appearance and proceedings of life became wonderful and

heavenly; and a paradise was created as out of the wrecks of Eden. ?196 And as

this creation itself is poetry, so its creations were poets; and language was

the instrument of their art: “Galeotto fu il libro, e chi lo scrisse”. {{Dante,

Inferno V.137}} The Proven?al Trouveurs, or inventors preceeded Petrarch, whose

verses are as spells which unseal the inmost enchanted fountains of the delight

which is in the grief of Love. ?197 It is impossible to feel them without

becoming a portion of that beauty which we contemplate: it were superfluous to

explain how the gentleness and the elevation of mind connected with these sacred

emotions can render men more amiable, more generous, and wise, and lift them out

of the dull vapours of the little world of self. ?198 Dante understood the

secret things of love even more than Petrarch. ?00 His Vita Nuova is an

inexhaustible fountain of purity of sentiment and language: it is the idealized

history of that period, and those intervals of his life which were dedicated to

love. ?199 His apotheosis of Beatrice in Paradise and the gradations of his own

love and her loveliness by which as by steps he feigns himself to have ascended

to the throne of the Supreme Cause, is the most {{Sig. 10v}} glorious

imagination of modern poetry. ?200 The acutest critics have justly reversed the

judgement of the vulgar and the order of the great acts of the “Divine Drama” in

the measure of the admiration which they accord to the Hell, Purgatory and

Paradise. ?201 The latter is a perpetual hymn of everlasting love. ?202 Love

which found a worthy poet in Plato alone of all the antients has been celebrated

by a chorus of the greatest writers of the renovated world; and the music has

penetrated the caverns of society, and its echoes still drown the dissonance of

arms, and superstition. ?203 At successive intervals Ariosto, Tasso, Shakespear,

Spenser, Calderon, Rousseau and the great writers of our own age have celebrated

the dominion of love; planting as it were trophies in the human mind of that

sublimest victory over sensuality and force. ?204 The true relation borne to

each other by the senses into which human kind is distributed has become less

misunderstood; and if the error which confounded diversity with in equality of

the powers of the two sexes has been partially recognized in the opinions and

institutions of modern Europe, we owe this great benefit to the worship of which

Chivalry was the law, and poets the prophets.

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?205 The poetry of Dante may be considered as the bridge thrown over the stream

of time which unites the modern and the antient world. ?206 The distorted

notions of invisible things which Dante and his rival Milton have idealised, are

merely the mask and the mantle in which these great poets walk through eternity

enveloped and disguised. ?207 It is a difficult question to determine how far

they were conscious of the distinction which must have subsisted in their minds

between their own creeds and that of the people. ?208 Dante at least appears to

wish to mark the full extent of it by placing Riph?us whom Virgil calls

justissimus unus {{Virgil, Aeneid II.426}} in Paradise, and observing a most

heretical caprice in his distribution of rewards and punishments. ?209 And

Milton’s poem contains within itself a philosophical refutation of that system

of which, by a strange and natural antithesis, it has been a chief popular

support. ?210 Nothing can exceed the energy and magnificence of the character as

expressed in Paradise Lost. ?211 It is a mistake to suppose that he could ever

have been intended for the popular personification of evil. ?212 Implacable

{{Sig. 11r}} hate, patient cunning, and a sleepless refinement of device to

inflict the extremest anguish on an enemy, these things are evil; and although

venial in a slave are not to be forgiven in a tyrant; although redeemed by much

that ennobles his defeat in one subdued, are marked by all that dishonours his

conquest in the victor. ?213 Milton’s Devil as a moral being is as far superior

to his God as one who perseveres in some purpose which he has conceived to be