"When words of felt truth were first spoken by the first pair, in love
of their garden, their God, and one another, and these words were with
joyful surprise felt to be in their form and glow answerable to the
happy thought uttered; then Poetry sprang. And when the first Father and
first Mother, settling their soul upon its thought, found that thought
brighten; and when from it, as thus they mused, like branchlets from a
branch, or flowerets from their bud, other thoughts came, ranging
themselves by the exerted, yet painlessly exerted, power of the soul, in
an order felt to be beautiful, and of a sound pleasant in utterance to
ear and soul; being withal, through the sweetness of their impression on
the heart, fixed for memory's frequentest recurrence; then was the
world's first poem composed, and in the joyful flutter of a heart that
had thus become a maker, the maker of a 'thing of beauty,' like in
beauty even unto God's heaven, and trees, and flowers, the secret of
Poesy shone tremulously forth."
Whether this be so or not, the highest poetic feeling of which we are
now conscious springs not from the beholding of perfected beauty, but
from the mute sympathy which the creation with all its children
manifests with us in the groaning and travailing which looketh for the
sonship.
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