Cicero sought to imitate the cadence
of his periods, but with little success. Lord Bacon was a poet.
[Footnote: See the Filum Labyrinthi, and the Essay on Death
particularly]. His language has a sweet and majestic rhythm, which
satisfies the sense, no less than the almost superhuman wisdom
of his philosophy satisfies the intellect; it is a strain which
distends, and then bursts the circumference of the reader's mind,
and pours itself forth together with it into the universal element
with which it has perpetual sympathy. All the authors of revolutions
in opinion are not only necessarily poets as they are inventors,
nor even as their words unveil the permanent analogy of things
by images which participate in the life of truth; but as their
periods are harmonious and rhythmical, and contain in themselves
the elements of verse; being the echo of the eternal music. Nor are
those supreme poets, who have employed traditional forms of rhythm
on account of the form and action of their subjects, less capable
of perceiving and teaching the truth of things, than those who
have omitted that form. Shakespeare, Dante, and Milton (to confine
ourselves to modern writers) are philosophers of the very loftiest
power.
A poem is the very image of life expressed in its eternal truth.
There is this difference between a story and a poem, that a story
is a catalogue of detached facts, which have no other connexion
than time, place, circumstance, cause and effect; the other is the
creation of actions according to the unchangeable forms of human
nature, as existing in the mind of the Creator, which is itself
the image of all other minds.
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