Page:The nature and elements of poetry, Stedman, 1892.djvu/46

16 for every emotion, words have been, or can be, found, as surely as there is a conquest of matter by the spirit; that speech, the soul's utterance, shares the subtilties of its master. Where it seems to fail, the fault is in the speaker. As a race goes on, both its conceptions and its emotions are clearer and richer, and language keeps pace with them. The time may come, indeed, when thought will not be "deeper than all speech," nor "feeling deeper than all thought." If we still lag in emotional expression, we can excite feelings similar to our own by the spells of art. I do not see why the primary elements of poetry in the concrete should not be stated without sophistication, and as clearly as those of painting, music, or architecture. They have, in fact, Oracles, old and new. been stated fragmentarily by one and another poet and thinker, most of whom agree on certain points. True criticism does not discredit old discovery in its quest for something more. Its office, as Mill says of philosophy, is not to set aside old definitions, but it "corrects and regulates them." It does not differ for the sake of novelty, but formulates what is, and shall be, of melody and thought and feeling, and what no less has been since first the morning stars sang together. I must ask you, then, to permit me, in this opening lecture, very swiftly to review familiar and historic utterances, from which we may combine principles eminently established, and, if need be, to add some newly stated factor, in our subsequent effort to