and for many days after, he strove to express this
tranquillity, and lo! his chisel had fashioned out
of marble the form of a beautiful youth, Phosphorus,
whose aspect is such that it is said all persons who
look on it become silent. The poet also resigns
himself to his mood, and that thought which agitated
him is expressed, but alter idem, in a manner totally
new. The expression is organic, or the new type which
things themselves take when liberated. As, in the sun,
objects paint their images on the retina of the eye,
so they, sharing the aspiration of the whole universe,
tend to paint a far more delicate copy of their essence
in his mind. Like the metamorphosis of things into
higher organic forms is their change into melodies.
Over everything stands its daemon or soul, and, as
the form of the thing is reflected by the eye, so the
soul of the thing is reflected by a melody. The sea,
the mountain-ridge, Niagara, and every flower-bed,
pre-exist, or super-exist, in pre-cantations, which
sail like odors in the air, and when any man goes by
with an ear sufficiently fine, he overhears them and
endeavors to write down the notes without diluting or
depraving them. And herein is the legitimation of
criticism, in the mind's faith that the poems are a
corrupt version of some text in nature with which they
ought to be made to tally. A rhyme in one of our sonnets
should not be less pleasing than the iterated nodes of
a sea-shell, or the resembling difference of a group
of flowers. The pairing of the birds is an idyl, not
tedious as our idyls are; a tempest is a rough ode,