--It can present us with new thought-forms--new, that is, as
revelations of thought. It has created none of the material that goes to
make these forms. Nor does it work upon raw material. But it takes forms
already existing, and gathers them about a thought so much higher than
they, that it can group and subordinate and harmonize them into a whole
which shall represent, unveil that thought. [Footnote: Just so Spenser
describes the process of the embodiment of a human soul in his Platonic
"Hymn in Honour of Beauty."
"She frames her house in which she will be placed
Fit for herself....
And the gross matter by a sovereign might
Tempers so trim....
For of the soul the body form doth take;
For soul is form, and doth the body make."]
The nature of this process we will illustrate by an examination of the
well-known _Bugle Song_ in Tennyson's "Princess."
First of all, there is the new music of the song, which does not even
remind one of the music of any other. The rhythm, rhyme, melody, harmony
are all an embodiment in sound, as distinguished from word, of what can
be so embodied--the _feeling_ of the poem, which goes before, and
prepares the way for the following thought--tunes the heart into a
receptive harmony.
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