To me
The prophet and the bard,
Shall yet maintain themselves--in higher circles yet,
Shall mediate to the modern, to democracy--interpret yet to them,
God and eidolons.
To me, the crown of savantism is to be, that it surely opens the way
for a more splendid theology, and for ampler and diviner songs. No
year, nor even century, will settle this. There is a phase of the
real, lurking behind the real, which it is all for. There is also
in the intellect of man, in time, far in prospective recesses, a
judgment, a last appellate court, which will settle it.
In certain parts in these flights, or attempting to depict or suggest
them, I have not been afraid of the charge of obscurity, in either of
my two volumes-because human thought, poetry or melody, must leave dim
escapes and outlets-must possess a certain fluid, aerial
character, akin to space itself, obscure to those of little or no
imagination,--but indispensable to the highest purposes. Poetic style,
when address'd to the soul, is less definite form, outline, sculpture,
and becomes vista, music, half-tints, and even less than half-tints.
True, it may be architecture; but again it may be the forest
wild-wood, or the best effect thereof, at twilight, the waving oaks
and cedars in the wind, and the impalpable odor.
Finally, as I have lived in fresh lands, inchoate, and in a
revolutionary age, future-founding, I have felt to identify the points
of that age, these lands, in my recitatives, altogether in my own way.
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