But we
let '_I_ DARE NOT wait upon I WOULD, like the poor cat in the adage.'
We want the creative faculty to imagine that which we know; we
want the generous impulse to act that which we imagine; we want the
poetry of life: our calculations have outrun conception; we have
eaten more than we can digest. The cultivation of those sciences
which have enlarged the limits of the empire of man over the
external world, has, for want of the poetical faculty, proportionally
circumscribed those of the internal world; and man, having enslaved
the elements, remains himself a slave. To what but a cultivation
of the mechanical arts in a degree disproportioned to the presence
of the creative faculty, which is the basis of all knowledge,
is to be attributed the abuse of all invention for abridging and
combining labour, to the exasperation of the inequality of mankind?
From what other cause has it arisen that the discoveries which should
have lightened, have added a weight to the curse imposed on Adam?
Poetry, and the principle of Self, of which money is the visible,
incarnation, are the God and Mammon of the world.
The functions of the poetical faculty are two-fold; by one it
creates new materials of knowledge and power and pleasure; by the
other it engenders in the mind a desire to reproduce and arrange
them according to a certain rhythm and order which may be called
the beautiful and the good. The cultivation of poetry is never more
to be desired than at periods when, from an excess of the selfish
and calculating principle, the accumulation of the materials of
external life exceed the quantity of the power of assimilating them
to the internal laws of human nature.
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