And the result of such effort, on the part of souls fittingly constituted, is alone what mankind have agreed to denominate Poetry. We say this with little fear of contradiction. Yet the spirit of our assertion must be more heeded than the letter. Mankind have _seemed_ to define Poesy in a thousand, and in a thousand conflicting definitions. But the war is one only of words. Induction is as well applicable to this subject as to the most palpable and utilitarian; and by its sober processes we find that, in respect to compositions which have been really received as poems, the _imaginative_, or, more popularly, the creative portions _alone_ have ensured them to be so received. Yet these works, on account of these portions, having once been so received and so named, it has happened, naturally and inevitably, that other portions totally unpoetic have not only come to be regarded by the popular voice as poetic, but have been made to serve as false standards of perfection, in the adjustment of other poetical claims. Whatever has been found in whatever has been received as a poem, has been blindly regarded as _ex statû_ poetic. And this is a species of gross error which scarcely could have made its way into any less intangible topic. In fact that license which appertains to the Muse herself, it has been thought decorous, if not sagacious to indulge, in all examination of her character. Poesy is thus seen to be a response—unsatisfactory it is true—but still in some measure a response, to a natural and irrepressible demand. Man being what he is, the time could never have been in which Poesy was not. Its first element is the thirst for supernal Beauty—a beauty which is not afforded the soul by any existing collocation of earth’s forms—a beauty which, perhaps, _no possible_ combination of these forms would fully produce. Its second element is the attempt to satisfy this thirst by _novel_ combinations among those forms of beauty which already exist—or by novel combinations _of those combinations which our predecessors, toiling in chase of the same phantom, have already set in order_. We thus clearly deduce the _novelty_, the _originality_, the _invention_, the _imagination_, or lastly the _creation_ of BEAUTY, (for the terms as here employed are synonymous) as the essence of all Poesy. Nor is this idea so much at variance with ordinary opinion as, at first sight, it may appear. A multitude of antique dogmas on this topic will be found, when divested of extrinsic speculation, to be easily resoluble into the definition now proposed. We do nothing more than present tangibly the vague clouds of the world’s idea. We recognize the idea itself floating, unsettled, indefinite, in every attempt which has yet been made to circumscribe the conception of “Poesy” in words. A striking instance of this is observable in the fact that no definition exists, in which either “the beautiful,” or some one of those qualities which we