We have still a thirst unquenchable, to allay which he has not
shown us the crystal springs. This thirst belongs to the immortality
of Man. It is at once a consequence and an indication of his perennial
existence. It is the desire of the moth for the star. It is no mere
appreciation of the Beauty before us, but a wild effort to reach the
Beauty above. Inspired by an ecstatic prescience of the glories beyond
the grave, we struggle by multiform combinations among the things
and thoughts of Time to attain a portion of that Loveliness whose very
elements perhaps appertain to eternity alone. And thus when by Poetry,
or when by Music, the most entrancing of the poetic moods, we find
ourselves melted into tears, we weep then, not as the Abbate Gravina
supposes, through excess of pleasure, but through a certain
petulant, impatient sorrow at our inability to grasp now, wholly, here
on earth, at once and for ever, those divine and rapturous joys of
which through the poem, or through the music, we attain to but brief
and indeterminate glimpses.
The struggle to apprehend the supernal Loveliness- this struggle, on
the part of souls fittingly constituted- has given to the world all
that which it (the world) has ever been enabled at once to
understand and to feel as poetic.
The Poetic Sentiment, of course, may develop itself in various
modes- in Painting, in Sculpture, in Architecture, in the Dance-
very especially in Music- and very peculiarly, and with a wide
field, in the composition of the Landscape Garden.
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