Who can doubt the innate charm of rhyme who has seen the
blue river repeat the blue o'erhead; who has been ravished by the
visible consonance of the tree growing at once toward an upward and
downward heaven on the edge of the twilight cove; or who has watched
how, as the kingfisher flitted from shore to shore, his visible echo
flies under him, and completes the fleeting couplet in the visionary
vault below? At least there can be no doubt that metre, by its
systematic and regular occurrence, gradually subjugates and tunes the
senses of the hearer, as the wood of the violin arranges itself in
sympathy with the vibration of the strings, and thus that predisposition
to the proper emotion is accomplished which is essential to the purpose
of the pest. You must not only expect, but you must expect in the right
way; you must be magnetized beforehand in every fibre by your own
sensibility in order that you may feel what and how you ought. The right
reception of whatever is ideally represented demands as a preliminary
condition an exalted, or, if not that, then an excited, frame of mind
both in poet and hearer. The imagination must be sensitized ere it will
take the impression of those airy nothings whose image is traced and
fixed by appliances as delicate as the golden pencils of the sun. Then
that becomes a visible reality which before was but a phantom of the
brain.
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