"
Poetry has been well called the record "of the best and happiest moments
of the happiest and best minds;" it is the light of life, the very "image
of life expressed in its eternal truth;" it immortalizes all that is best
and most beautiful in the world; "it purges from our inward sight the film
of familiarity which obscures from us the wonder of our being;" "it is the
center and circumference of knowledge;" and poets are "mirrors of the
gigantic shadows which futurity caste upon the present."
Poetry, in effect, lengthens life; it creates for us time, if time be
realized as the succession of ideas and not of minutes; it is the "breath
and finer spirit of all knowledge;" it is bound neither by time nor space,
but lives in the spirit of man. What greater praise can be given than the
saying that life should be Poetry put into action.
[1] See Lessing's _Laocooen_.
[2] Arnold.
[3] Coleridge.
[4] Horace.
[5] Wordsworth.
[6] Plato.
[7] Bacon.
[8] Shakespeare.
[9] St.
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