melancholy, which are as natural and appropriate, in particular
circumstances, or to certain occasions, as the odor to the flower;
rising at such seasons, into the minds of all classes of persons,
instinctive and unbidden, yet in obedience to some law of association
which it is the gift of the poet to apprehend. Its graceful
purpose is to exhibit an incident in the substance of an emotion,
to communicate wisdom in the form of sentiment; it is the refracted
gleam of some wandering ray from the fair orb of moral truth, which
glancing against some occurrence in common life, is surprised into
a smile of quick-darting, many colored beauty; it is the airy ripple
that is thrown up when the current of feeling in human hearts
accidentally encounters the current of thought and bubbles forth
with a gentle fret of sparkling foam. Self-evolved, almost, and
obedient in its development and shaping to some inward spark of
beauty which appears to possess and control its course, it might
almost seem that, in the out-going loveliness of such productions,
sentiment made substantial in language, floated abroad in natural
self-delivery; as that heat which is not yet flame, gives forth
in blue wreaths of vaporous grace, which unfold their delicateness
for a moment upon the tranquil air, and then vanish away. It is
not an artificial structure built up by intellect after a model
foreshaped by fancy, or foreshadowed by the instincts of the
passions; it is a simple emotion, crystalled into beauty by passing
for a moment through the cooler air of the mind; it is merely
an effluence of creative vigor; a graceful feeling thickened into
words. Its proper dwelling is in the atmosphere of the sentiments,
no the passions; it will not, indeed, repel the sympathy of deeper
feelings, but knows them rather under the form of the flower that
floats upon the surface of meditation, than of the deeper root that
lies beneath its stream. And this is the grievous fault of nearly