"What is Poetry?--The feeling of a Former world and Future.
"Why, at the very height of desire and human pleasure,--worldly, social, amorous, ambitious, or even avaricious,--does there mingle a certain sense of doubt and sorrow--a fear of what is to come--a doubt of what _is_--a retrospect to the past, leading to a prognostication of the future? (The best of Prophets of the future is the Past.) Why is this? or these?--I know not, except that on a pinnacle we are most susceptible of giddiness, and that we never fear falling except from a precipice--the higher, the more awful, and the more sublime; and, therefore, I am not sure that Fear is not a pleasurable sensation; at least, _Hope_ is; and _what Hope_ is there without a deep leaven of Fear? and what sensation is so delightful as Hope? and, if it were not for Hope, where would the Future be?--in hell. It is useless to say _where_ the Present is, for most of us know; and as for the Past, _what_ predominates in memory?--_Hope baffled_. Ergo, in all human affairs, it is Hope--Hope--Hope. I allow sixteen minutes, though I never counted them, to any given or supposed possession. From whatever place we commence, we know where it all must end. And yet, what good is there in knowing it? It does not make men better or wiser. During the greatest horrors of the greatest plagues, (Athens and Florence, for example--see Thucydides and Machiavelli,) men were more cruel and profligate than ever. It is all a mystery. I feel most things, but I know nothing, except ------------------------------------------------------------- -------------------------------------------------------------------- --------------------------------------------------------------------[21]
"_Thought for a speech of Lucifer, in the tragedy of Cain:_--
"Were _Death_ an _evil_, would _I_ let thee _live_? Fool! live as I live--as thy father lives, And thy son's sons shall live for evermore.
[Footnote 21: Thus marked, with impatient strokes of the pen, by himself in the original.]
"I have been reading W.F.S * * (brother to the other of the name) till now, and I can make out nothing. He evidently shows a great power of words, but there is nothing to be taken hold of. He is like Hazlitt, in English, who _talks pimples_--a red and white corruption rising up (in little imitation of mountains upon maps), but containing nothing, and discharging nothing, except their own humours.