The
youth asks for a poem. The very dunces wish to go to the theatre.
What private heavens can we not open, by yielding to all the
suggestion of rich music! We must have idolatries, mythologies, some
swing and verge for the creative power lying coiled and cramped here,
driving ardent natures to insanity and crime, if it do not find vent.
Without the great and beautiful arts which speak to the sense of
beauty, a man seems to me a poor, naked, shivering creature. These
are his becoming draperies, which warm and adorn him. Whilst the
prudential and economical tone of society starves the imagination,
affronted Nature gets such indemnity as she may. The novel is that
allowance and frolic the imagination finds. Everything else pins it
down, and men flee for redress to Byron, Scott, Disraeli, Dumas, Sand,
Balzac, Dickens, Thackeray, and Reade. Their education is neglected;
but the circulating library and the theatre, as well as the
trout-fishing, the Notch Mountains, the Adirondac country, the tour
to Mont Blanc, to the White Hills, and the Ghauts, make such amends
as they can.
The imagination infuses a certain volatility and intoxication. It
has a flute which sets the atoms of our frame in a dance, like
planets, and, once so liberated, the whole man reeling drunk to the
music, they never quite subside to their old stony state.
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