Romance of Louisiana History [pp. 449-462]

THE
C 0 MM]' RT C -I_ A H -I Al T.
VOLUME III.] JUNE, 1847. [NUMBER VI.
......... L.
Art. I. —ROIANCE OF LOUISIANA IISTORY.*
PODTRY is the daughter of imagination, and imagination is, perhaps,
one of the highest gifts of heaven, the most refined ethereal part of
the mind, >cause when carried to perfection, it is the combined essence
o,f all the finest faculties of the human intellect. There may he sound
judgment, acute perdeptions, depth of thought, great powers of concep"ion, of discrimination, of research, of assimilation, of combination of
ideas, without imagination, or least without that part of it which ela.
P)orates and exalts itself into poetry, but how can we conceive the
existence of a poetical imagination in its highest excellence, without all
the Alother faculties? Without them, what imagination would not fe
imperfect or diseased? It is true that without imagination there mnay
lbe a world within the mind, but it is a world without light. Cold it
remains, and suffering from the effects of partial organization, unless
by some mighty fiat imagination is breathed into the dormant mass, and
the sun of poetry, emerging in the heaven of the mind, illumines and
warms the several elements of which it is composed, and completes
the creation of the intell,ect.
Hence the idea of all that is beautiful and great is concentrated(i in
the word poetry. There is no grand conception of the mind in which
that intellectual faculty which constitutes poetry is not to be detected.
* The present article comprises the substance of an address delivered by the Iuon
J. Gayarre, before the People's Lyceum, at New Orleans, in April last, and nowl
first committed to print.
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