53. Thus poetry, regarded as a vehicle of thought, is especially
impressive partly because it obeys all the laws of effective speech,
and partly because in so doing it imitates the natural utterances
of excitement. While the matter embodied is idealized emotion,
the vehicle is the idealized language of emotion. As the musical
composer catches the cadences in which our feelings of joy and
sympathy, grief and despair, vent themselves, and out of these
germs evolves melodies suggesting higher phases of these feelings;
I so, the poet develops from the typical expressions in which men
utter passion and sentiment, those choice forms of verbal combination
in which concentrated passion and sentiment may be fitly presented.
54. There is one peculiarity of poetry conducing much
to its effect--the peculiarity which is indeed usually thought its
characteristic one--still remaining to be considered: we mean its
rhythmical structure. This, improbable though it seems, will be
found to come under the same generalization with the others.
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