has been felt by all nations on the first invention of metre; it must
act according to laws derivable from its own essence, otherwise its
strength will evaporate in boundless vacuity.

The works of genius cannot therefore be permitted to be without form;
but of this there is no danger. However, that we may answer this
objection of want of form, we must understand the exact meaning of the
term "form," since most critics, and more especially those who insist
on a stiff regularity, interpret it merely in a mechanical, and not in
an organical sense. Form is mechanical when, through external force,
it is imparted to any material merely as an accidental addition
without reference to its quality; as, for example, when we give a
particular shape to a soft mass that it may retain the same after its
induration. Organical form, again, is innate; it unfolds itself from
within, and requires its determination contemporaneously with the
perfect development of the germ. We everywhere discover such forms in
nature throughout the whole range of living powers, from the
crystallization of salts and minerals to plants and flowers, and from
these again to the human body. In the fine arts, as well as in the
domain of nature, the supreme artist, all genuine forms are organical,
that is, determined by the quality of the work. In a word, the form is
nothing but a significant exterior, the speaking physiognomy of each
thing, which, as long as it is not disfigured by any destructive
accident, gives a true evidence of its hidden essence.

Hence it is evident that the spirit of poetry, which, though
imperishable, migrates, as it were, through different bodies, must, so
often as it is newly born in the human race, mold to itself, out of
the nutrimental substance of an altered age, a body of a different
conformation. The forms vary with the direction taken by the poetical