There is some organic law of expression which, as it must have dictated the first formation of language, must also to a certain extent govern and modulate its use. That there is such a law a common drum-head will teach us, for if you cover it with fine sand and strike it, the particles will arrange themselves in a certain regular order in sympathy with its vibrations. So it is well known that the wood of a violin shows an equal sensibility, and an old instrument is better than a new one because all resistance has been overcome. I have observed, too, as something that distinguishes singing birds from birds of prey, that their flight is made up of a series of parabolic curves, with rests at regular intervals, produced by a momentary folding of the wings; as if the law of their being were in some sort metrical and they _flew_ musically. Who can doubt the innate charm of rhyme whose eye has ever been delighted by the visible consonance of the tree growing at once toward an upward and a downward heaven on the edge of an unrippled river; or, as the kingfisher flits from shore to shore, his silent echo flies under him and completes the vanishing couplet in the visionary world below? Who can question the divine validity of number, proportion, and harmony, who has studied the various rhythms of the forest? Look for example at the pine, how its branches, balancing each other, ray out from the tapering stem in stanza after stanza, how spray answers to spray, and leaf to leaf in ordered strophe and antistrophe, till the perfect tree stands an embodied ode, through which the unthinking wind cannot wander without finding the melody that is in it and passing away in music. Language, as the poets use it, is something more than an expedient for conveying thought. If mere meaning were all, then would the Dictionary be always the most valuable work in any tongue, for in it exist potentially all eloquence, all wisdom, all pathos, and all wit. It is a great wild continent of words ready to be tamed and subjugated, to have its meanings and uses applied. The prose writer finds there his quarry and his timber; but the poet enters it like Orpheus, and makes its wild inmates sing and dance and keep joyous time to every wavering fancy of his lyre. All language is dead invention, and our conversational currency is one of shells like that of some African tribes--shells in which poetic thoughts once housed themselves, and colored with the tints of morning. But the poet can give back to them their energy and freshness; can conjure symbolic powers out of the carnal and the trite. For it is only an enchanted sleep, a simulated death, that benumbs language; and see how, when the true prince-poet comes, the arrested blood and life are set free again by the touch of his fiery lips, and as Beauty awakens through all her many-chambered palace runs a thrill as of creation, giving voice and motion and intelligence to what but now were dumb and stiffened images.