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But little did the infant dream
That all the treasures of the world were by;
And that himself was so the cream
And crown of all which round about did lie.
Yet thus it was: the Gem,
The Diadem,
The ring enclosing all
That stood upon this earthly ball,
The heavenly Eye,
Much wider than the sky
Wherein they all included were,
The glorious soul that was the King,
Made to possess them, did appear
A small and little thing!

We may safely go some way even beyond this, and lay it down for unchallengeable truth that over and above Man’s consciousness of being the eye of the Universe and receptacle, however imperfect, of its great harmony, he has a native impulse to merge himself in that harmony and be one with it: a spirit in his heart (as the Scripture puts it) “of adoption, whereby we cry, Abba, Father”—And because ye are sons, God hath sent forth the Spirit of His Son into your hearts, crying, Abba, Father. In his daily life he is for ever seeking after harmony in avoidance of chaos, cultivating personal habits after the clock; in his civic life forming governments, attempting hierarchies, laws, constitutions, by which (as he hopes) a system of society will work in tune, almost automatically. When he fights he has learnt that his fighting men shall march in rhythm and deploy rhythmically, and they do so to regimental music. If he haul rope or weigh anchor, setting out to sea, or haul up his ship on a beach, he has proved by experiment that these operations are performed more than twice as easily when done to a tune. But these are dull, less than half-conscious, imitations of the great harmony for which, when he starts out to understand and interpret it consciously, he must use the most godlike of all his gifts. Now the most godlike of all human gifts–the singular gift separating Man from the brutes–is speech. If he can harmonise speech he has taught his first and peculiar faculty to obey the great rhythm: “I will sing and give praise,” says the Psalmist, “with the best member that I have.” Thus by harmonising speech (in a fashion we will discuss by and by), he arrives at Poetry.

* * * * *

But an objection may be raised. “Is the tongue, rather than the brain, the best member that I have?” or (to put it in another way), “Surely a man’s thoughts about the Universe have more value than his words about it?”

The answer is, that we cannot separate them: and Newman has put this so cogently that I must quote him, making no attempt to water down his argument with words of my own. “Thought and speech are inseparable from one another. Matter and expression are parts of one: style is a thinking out into language. This is literature; not things, but the verbal symbols of things; not on the other hand mere words, but thoughts expressed in language. Call to mind the meaning of the Greek word which expresses this special prerogative of Man over the feeble intelligence of the lower animals. It is called Logos. What does Logos mean? It stands both for reason and for speech, and it is difficult to say which means more properly. It means both at once: why? Because really they cannot be divided…. When we can separate light and illumination, life and motion, the convex and the concave of a curve, then will it be possible for thought to tread speech under foot and to hope to do without it–then will it be conceivable that the vigorous and fertile intellect should renounce its own double, its instrument of expression and the channel of its speculations and emotions.” Words, in short, are the outward and visible signs of thought: that, and something more–since you may prove by experiment that the shortest and simplest train of thought cannot be followed unless at every step the mind silently casts it into the mould of words.