A Defense of Poetry is the only entirely finished prose work 
 Shelley left. In this we find the reverence with which he 
 regarded his art. We discern his power of close reasoning, 
 and the unity of his views of human nature. The language is 
 imaginative, but not flowery ; the periods have an intonation 
 full of majesty and grace ; and the harmony of the style being 
 united to melodious thought, a music results, that swells upon 
 the ear, and fills the mind with delight. 
 
 MRS. SHELLEY, Preface to Essays, etc., by Percy Bysshe Shelley. 
 
 To prefer or to equal Shelley's prose to his poetry is a merely 
 uncritical freak of judgment. His prose is, however, of excel- 
 lent quality, both in his letters, which are among the most charm- 
 ing of their kind, and in his too few essays and miscellaneous 
 writings. SAINTSBURY, Specimens of English Prose Style, p. 342. 
 
 The mere whim, the bare idea, that poetry is a deep thing, a 
 teaching thing, the most surely and wisely elevating of human 
 things, is even now to the coarse public mind nearly unknown. 
 . . . All about and around us a faith in poetry struggles to be 
 extricated, but it is not extricated. Some day, at the touch of 
 the true word, the whole confusion will by magic cease ; the 
 broken and shapeless notions will cohere and crystallize into a 
 bright and true theory. BAGEHOT, Literary Studies, 2. 339-341.
 
 A DEFENSE OF POETRY 
 
 EDITED 
 
 WITH INTRODUCTION AND NOTES 
 BY 
 
 ALBERT S. COOK 
 
 PROFESSOR OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE AND LITERATURE 
 IN YALE UN1VERSITV 
 
 BOSTON, U.S.A. 
 
 PUBLISHED BY GINN & COMPANY 
 1891
 
 Entered, according to Act of Congress, in the year 1890, by 
 
 ALBERT S. COOK, 
 in the Office of the Librarian of Congress, at Washington. 
 
 ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. 
 
 TYPOGRAPHY BY J. S. GUSHING & Co., BOSTON, U.S.A. 
 TRESSWORK BY GINN & Co., BOSTON, U.S.A.
 
 TO THE MEMORY OF 
 
 EDWARD ROWLAND SILL 
 
 A DEFENDER OF POETRY
 
 CONTENTS. 
 
 PAGE 
 
 INTRODUCTION vii 
 
 Style vii 
 
 Shelley's Views in Comparison with Sidney's xvii 
 
 The Provinces of Inspiration and of Labor xx 
 
 ANALYSIS xxvii 
 
 A DEFENSE OF POETRY i 
 
 THE FOUR AGES OF POETRY 47 
 
 NOTES 63 
 
 INDEX OF PROPER NAMES . 81
 
 INTRODUCTION. 
 
 i . STYLE. 
 
 SHELLEY'S prose, though by no means excessively ca- 
 denced or adorned, has yet some of the marks and qualities 
 of poetry. It can scarcely be called poetic prose, as much 
 of Ruskin's might not unfairly be styled ; nor does it answer 
 in all respects to the accepted notions of a poet's prose. 
 Perhaps its characteristic has been sufficiently defined by 
 himself in his own discussion of the ' vulgar error ' that 
 prose can never be the vehicle of an essentially poetic con- 
 ception. In this discussion he does not shrink from definite 
 statements and concrete examples (9 &-si) : " Plato was 
 essentially a poet the truth and splendor of his imagery, 
 and the melody of his language, are the most intense that it 
 is possible to conceive. . . . He forbore to invent any regu- 
 lar plan of rhythm which would include, under determinate 
 forms, the varied pauses of his style. Cicero sought to 
 imitate the cadence of his periods, but with little success. 
 Lord Bacon was a poet. His language has a sweet and 
 majestic rhythm which satisfies the sense. ... All the 
 authors of revolution in opinion are not only necessarily 
 poets as they are inventors, . . . but as their periods are 
 harmonious and rhythmical." 
 
 The author himself has thus enunciated two criteria which 
 may be applied to the prose written by a poet or in a poetic 
 mood : 
 
 1. Truth and splendor of imagery. 
 
 2. Melody or rhythm, varied, indeterminate, and in- 
 imitable.
 
 viii INTR OD UCTION. 
 
 That Shelley's prose imagery possesses both truth and 
 splendor there can be no question. Mrs. Shelley, surely not 
 an incompetent critic, distinctly attributes to his language 
 both the qualities just mentioned, and it needs no exhaus- 
 tive scrutiny 'to determine that for these qualities his lan- 
 guage is chiefly indebted to its figurative expressions. In 
 the preface to her edition of his essays, she says : "Shelley 
 commands language splendid and melodious as Plato." 
 
 The imagery of this essay always completes, if it does not 
 effect, the revelation of its author's thought. A mind of 
 more prosaic temper might attain equal clearness without 
 the employment of metaphorical language, but clearness 
 may in such cases be gained at the expense of suggestive- 
 ness. There is a creeping clearness, as there is a volant 
 amplitude of vision, no less certain than that of the eagle 
 when he swoops magnificently down upon his prey from the 
 central deeps of air. It is the latter that Shelley possesses, 
 and herein he reminds us of Shakespeare when the great 
 dramatist is most felicitous in wedding virile thought to the 
 clinging beauty of tropical language. In Agamemnon's 
 speech to his auxiliar kings, Shakespeare makes him thus 
 eloquently illustrate a commonplace heroic : 
 
 \Vhy then, you princes, 
 
 Do you with cheeks abashed behold our works, 
 And think them shames, which are indeed nought else 
 But the protractive trials of great Jove, 
 To find persistive constancy in men? 
 The fineness of which metal is not found 
 In fortune's love; for then the bold and coward, 
 The wise and fool, the artist and unread, 
 The hard and soft, seem all affined and kin; 
 But, in the wind and tempest of her frown, 
 Distinction, with a broad and powerful fan, 
 Puffing at all, winnows the light away; 
 And what hath mass or matter by itself 
 Lies rich in virtue and unmingled.
 
 INTRODUCTION. ix 
 
 Now it is no sufficient objection to the dramatist's use of 
 figurative language to say that all this expenditure of words 
 is but the amplification of a single short sentence, " Adver- 
 sity distinguishes the hero from the poltroon." Nor is it an 
 answer to say that such introduction of metaphor is suitable 
 to poetry, but not to prose, else what censure must be pro- 
 nounced on such an evident metaphor as this, " Whose fan 
 is in his hand, and he will thoroughly purge his floor, and 
 gather his wheat into the garner ; but he will burn up the chaff 
 with unquenchable fire?" We praise the aptness, as well as 
 the beauty, of Jeremy Taylor's famous simile : " For so have 
 I seen a lark rising from his bed of grass, soaring upwards 
 and singing as he rises and hopes to get to heaven and 
 climb above the clouds ; but the poor bird was beaten back 
 with the loud sighings of an eastern wind and his motion 
 made irregular and inconstant, descending more at every 
 breath of the tempest than it could recover by the vibration 
 and frequent weighing of his wings, till the little creature 
 was forced to sit down and pant and stay till the storm was 
 over ; and then it made a prosperous flight and did rise and 
 sing as if it had learned music and motion from an angel as 
 he passed sometimes through the air about his ministries 
 here below. So is the prayer of a good man," etc. But if 
 we admire the fitness of this image, there is no room left 
 for us to condemn the not dissimilar expressions of Shelley : 
 " The world, as from a resurrection, balancing itself on the 
 golden wings of knowledge and of hope, has reassumed its 
 yet unwearied flight into the heaven of time. Listen to the 
 music, unheard by outward ears, which is as a ceaseless and 
 invisible wind, nourishing its everlasting course with strength 
 and swiftness." 
 
 But, indeed, there is no necessity of defending figurative 
 language on the score of its services to truth, so long as we 
 can appeal to the example of England's most philosophical 
 politician. Burke, in his Letter to a Noble Lord, does not
 
 x INTRODUCTION. 
 
 shrink from the employment of a trope hardly less elaborate 
 than those that have just been cited, and no one has yet 
 been bold enough to censure him for temerity, or to insinuate 
 that he could more exactly have conveyed his thought by 
 eschewing the ornaments of verse. Rising to the demands 
 of the occasion, Burke says : " But as to our country and 
 our race, as long as the well-compacted structure of our 
 church and state, the sanctuary, the holy of holies of that 
 ancient law, defended by reverence, defended by power, a 
 fortress at once and a temple, shall stand inviolate on the 
 brow of the British Sion as long as the British monarchy, 
 not more limited than fenced by the orders of the state, 
 shall, like the proud Keep of Windsor, rising in the majesty 
 of proportion, and girt with the double belt of its kindred 
 and coeval towers, as long as this awful structure shall over- 
 see and guard the subjected land so long the mounds and 
 dykes of the low, fat Bedford level will have nothing to fear 
 from all the pickaxes of all the levelers of France." 
 
 Is Shelley's imagery splendid? If not splendid, it is at 
 least generally beautiful, and bears an obvious resemblance to 
 that of his poetry. Many of his illustrations are drawn from 
 light, fire, the wind, music, birds, and flowers. It would be 
 an agreeable and instructive task to make a collection of his 
 metaphorical phrases, to trace his indebtedness to the Bible 
 and other classics, and to spell out the character of his 
 genius in the light of his similes, but we cannot afford our- 
 selves the indulgence in this place. 
 
 We pass now to the second head, that of melody or rhythm. 
 The inference from his words is that the rhythm of a poet's 
 prose is inimitable, because varied and indeterminate. Varied 
 and indeterminate it may be, but no less unmistakable. The 
 melody of Shelley's language, if not " the most intense that 
 it is possible to conceive," is sufficiently intense to differen- 
 tiate it from ordinary, plodding, work-a-day prose, and to 
 seem, as indeed it is, " an echo of the eternal music." This
 
 INTR OD UC TION. xi 
 
 melody is heard at its best in sentences like the follow- 
 ing : 
 
 " The Past, like an inspired rhapsodist, fills the theatre of 
 everlasting generations with their harmony." 
 
 " Its secret alchemy turns to potable gold the poisonous 
 waters which flow from death through life." (Perhaps sug- 
 gested by such Shakespearean lines as M.N.D. 3. 2. 391 : 
 "Turns into yellow gold his salt green streams " ; Sonn. 33. 
 3 : " Gilding pale streams with heavenly alchemy" ; K.John 
 3. i. 77, etc.). 
 
 Still more striking than these are the two sentences cited 
 on p. i. 
 
 It will be observed that sentences of this order have a 
 sustained flight, like that of the bird of paradise, which is 
 fabled never to touch the earth, or rather, if we may adapt 
 Jeremy Taylor's simile, already quoted, like the impulsive 
 soaring of the lark, which ever and anon returns to the 
 meadow whence it sprang, and does not at once shake 
 itself free of its lowly surroundings, but which exults in its 
 spacious liberty when the earth has fairly been left behind, 
 and with glad pulsations lifts itself higher and higher into 
 the immeasurable profound of air. Sentences like those 
 quoted above, when examined with reference to their pauses, 
 are seen to have no natural caesura near the end. They 
 spring through a short clause, or a succession of them, to a 
 coign of vantage, and thence set out on an aerial journey 
 which halts not till it ends. No antithesis marks their close, 
 no qualifying clause slipped in almost at the last moment, 
 no suspension which throws the verb, with an abrupt break, 
 to the very end, no explicative remark intended merely to 
 confirm or extend that which precedes, no correlative added 
 for the sake of more perfect balance. Examples of such 
 broken endings might readily be adduced, and I select from 
 Ruskin's Sesame and Lilies an instance to illustrate each of 
 the foregoing heads :
 
 xii INTR OD UC TION. 
 
 " Strong always to sanctify, even when they cannot save." 
 
 " A broken metaphor, one might think, careless and un- 
 scholarly." 
 
 " And sown in us daily, and by us, as instantly as may be, 
 choked." 
 
 " Only so far as may enable her to sympathize in her 
 husband's pleasures, and in those of his best friends." 
 
 " We gloat over the pathos of the police court, and gather 
 the night-dew of the grave." 
 
 It is impossible to lay down any rule for the construction 
 of prose rhythms. If such a rule could be deduced, the 
 rhythm would no longer be varied and indeterminate. Still 
 an examination of the final sentences of Shelley's paragraphs 
 is instructive with reference to the means by which the con- 
 tinuous harmony is so long maintained. When the final 
 clause exceeds the ordinary length and is interrupted by no 
 appreciable caesura, it will frequently be found that it con- 
 tains a succession of two or more prepositional phrases, 
 more rarely that the place of the first prepositional phrase is 
 occupied by a noun, the subject or object of a verb, with or 
 without one or more attributive adjectives, or that the second 
 prepositional phrase is adverbial in its function. Nor is it 
 alone in the final sentences of Shelley's paragraphs that such 
 constructions appear to be typical. Other instances are : 
 
 " Become as generals to the bewildered armies of their 
 thoughts." 
 
 "And gathers a sort of reduplication from the com- 
 munity." 
 
 " It must be impanelled by Time from the selectest of the 
 wise of many generations." 
 
 " The receptacle of a thousand unapprehended combina- 
 tions of thought." 
 
 " To have abdicated this throne of their widest domin- 
 ion." 
 
 " Out of a chaos of inharmonious barbarisms."
 
 INTR OD UC TION. xiii 
 
 But the moment a serious attempt is made to establish 
 the universality of such a supposed rule, that moment disap- 
 pointment is likely to overtake the observer, and to nip in 
 the bud any future endeavors to determine even the most 
 elementary laws of verbal harmony in prose. Yet, confined 
 within proper limits, such endeavors need not be unprofit- 
 able ; they should be judged in the light of the inquiries, 
 extending over centuries, and still continued, into the rhythms 
 of Lysias and Demosthenes, and it should not be hastily con- 
 cluded that what is advantageous in Greek becomes a vanity 
 and a delusion in English. 
 
 Shelley's attachment to a few favorite images leads him, 
 as has been already intimated, into repetition. As the most 
 intricate musical compositions are built up out of the few 
 notes of the scale, so poets, even when writing prose, appear 
 to have a few simple elements to which they frequently re- 
 turn, and to vary and modulate upon a few primary chords. 
 Among Shelley's key-words are ' harmony,' ' harmonious,' 
 'rhythm,' 'order or rhythm,' 'rhythm and order.' Akin to 
 this practice, but yet different from it, is that of repeating 
 certain syllables or sounds, simply because the echo of them 
 still lingers in the ear. Whether Shelley's use of the figure 
 of polysyndeton, especially in the case of ' and,' is to be 
 referred to this cause, may be allowed to remain an open 
 question. But other instances are less doubtful, and can 
 only be regarded as blemishes, since they transgress a higher 
 euphonic law. Such are : 
 
 " Film of/tf/w/'/iarity (42 ie) . 
 
 " Affected, a moral aim, and the effect of their poetry " 
 
 (152). 
 
 " An equal sensibility to the influence of the senses " 
 (21 so). 
 
 "As its forms survived in the unre/<?rwed worship of 
 modern Europe " (32 is). 
 
 But especially the multiplication of words ending in the
 
 xiv INTRODUCTION. 
 
 sound of -sion, preceded by a vowel, such as the follow- 
 ing: 
 
 "The incorporation of the Celtic nations with the ex- 
 hausted population " (27 26). 
 
 " He omits the observation of conditions still more im- 
 portant, and more is lost than gained by the substitution of 
 the rigidly-defined and ever-repeated idealisms of a distorted 
 superstition for the loving impersonations of the truth of 
 human passion " (17 25-30) ; cf. Sidney, Defense 53 si, note. 
 
 Another form of repetition is that of identical words, such 
 as 'alleged' (31 4,7), 'practice ' (17 3,4). Not to be con- 
 founded with these are such as selectest: selectest (2328), 
 and partial: partially (24 1,2), which illustrate a rhetorical 
 device. 
 
 Alliteration in prose is due to the same retention and un- 
 conscious reverberation of a sound, this time fragmentary 
 and initial, a single phonetic element instead of a group of 
 such. Shelley does not escape this fault, or rather he in- 
 dulges a common and pardonable propensity beyond the 
 limits which are imposed by the severe taste of certain 
 critics. " The mask and the mantle " (30 s) would almost 
 pass unnoticed, and " the fragrance of all the flowers of the 
 field " (21 20) can be readily condoned. But the following 
 will not so easily escape remark : 
 
 " It overcomes and sickens the spirit with excess of sweet- 
 ness " (21 17). 
 
 " A monologue, where all the attention may be directed 
 to some great waster of ideal wimicry. The modern prac- 
 tice," etc. (17 i). 
 
 " The y'ury which sits in judgment upon a poet must be 
 composed, of his peers ; it must be im/anelled by Time. . . . 
 A poet is a nightingale, who sits in darkness and .rings to 
 cheer its own solitude with sweet sounds ; his auditors are 
 as men entranced by the ;elody of an unseen musician, who 
 feel that they are moved,' 1 etc. (1127-122). Perhaps the
 
 INTRODUCTION. xv 
 
 misquotation in 35 27-8 owes its form to the instinct for 
 alliteration, and ' feasting ' becomes ' mirth,' because ' mourn- 
 ing ' had preceded. 
 
 One feature of a poetical style Shelley avoids, the intro- 
 duction of compound words, such as Sidney loved and 
 abounded in (cf. Sidney, Defense 55 25, note, and the In- 
 troduction, pp. xxiv-xxv). A half-dozen practically exhaust 
 the list: 'all-penetrating' (4622), 'ever-changing' (2 e), 
 'ever-repeated' (17 28), ' low-thoughted ' (45 ai), 'many- 
 sided' (19 e), and 'owl-eyed' (394). Of these, 'low- 
 thoughted ' is a quotation, and ' owl-winged ' is the only 
 other that has a decidedly poetic air. 
 
 Before leaving the subject of Shelley's style, a single defect 
 and a compensating merit must be noticed. The defect 
 is that the poet as prosaist is sometimes ungrammatical. 
 The congruence of a verb with its subject, for example, is 
 not always observed. Examples are : 
 
 " As the temporary dress . . . , which cover without con- 
 cealing," etc. (12 29). 
 
 " With which the author, in common with his auditors, are 
 infected" (1922). 
 
 " The chosen delicacy of expressions . . . are as a mist," 
 etc. (24s). 
 
 " His apotheosis of Beatrice, and the gradations . . . is 
 the most glorious imagination of modern poetry" (29 3-s). 
 
 " After one person and one age has exhausted all its 
 divine effluence which their peculiar relations enable them 
 to share," etc. (33 10-12) . 
 
 " The accumulation of the materials of external life ex- 
 ceed," etc. (38 n). 
 
 The verbal noun uniformly takes an object: "The estab- 
 lishing a relation," etc. (17 23; cf. 17 24, 34 12-15). 
 
 A peculiar confusion is illustrated by the following : " Each 
 division in the art was made perfect . . . , and was disci- 
 plined into a beautiful proportion and unity one towards the 
 other" (16 17-20).
 
 XVI 
 
 INTRODUCTION. 
 
 The connective as here does duty in a construction to 
 which it is not perfectly adapted : " Never was blind strength 
 and stubborn form so disciplined . . . , or that will less re- 
 pugnant, . . . as during the century," etc. (15i"~ 2 i). 
 
 In the following the second member of the compound 
 sentence is left without a verb : " Tragedy becomes a cold 
 imitation . . . ; and often the very form misunderstood, or 
 a weak attempt to teach certain doctrines," etc. (19 u ff.). 
 ' Form ' and ' attempt ' simulate noun-subjects, but the close 
 of the sentence leaves them suspended, as it were, in mid- 
 air. 
 
 These offences, it will be said, are venial, and so indeed 
 they are in relation to the splendid qualities by which they 
 are offset, but the reference to them may perhaps serve as 
 an excuse for occasional lapses in our elder writers, as where 
 Sidney says {Defense 47 28 ) : " Our tragedies and comedies 
 not without cause cried out against," etc., in which the finite 
 verb is lacking. 
 
 The counterbalancing, and more than counterbalancing, 
 merit, is the apothegmatic character of many of Shelley's 
 statements. Perhaps no English essay so flowing and easy 
 in its style, and so brief in its compass, ever contained an 
 equally large number of pregnant sayings, so excellently true 
 and so adequately expressed. Two, at least, have become 
 proverbial : " Poetry is the record of the best and happiest 
 moments of the happiest and best minds." " The rich have 
 become richer, and the poor poorer." But there is a large 
 number scarcely less deserving of popular currency. A few 
 of these may be instanced : 
 
 " A poem is the very image of life expressed in its eternal 
 truth." 
 
 " It is not what the erotic poets have, but what they have 
 not, in which their imperfection consists." 
 
 " A man, to be greatly good, must imagine intensely and 
 comprehensively."
 
 INTRODUCTION. xvii 
 
 " Man, having enslaved the elements, remains himself a 
 slave." 
 
 " For the end of social corruption is to destroy all sensi- 
 bility to pleasure; and therefore it is corruption." 
 
 " Tragedy delights by affording a shadow of that pleasure 
 which exists in pain." 
 
 " All high poetry is infinite ; it is as the first acorn, which 
 contains all oaks potentially." 
 
 But to continue to quote would be to repeat the Essay in 
 the Introduction. 
 
 2. SHELLEY'S VIEWS IN COMPARISON WITH SIDNEY'S. 
 
 In essentials Shelley and Sidney agree. Both being poets, 
 and acquainted with the same early literatures and authori- 
 ties, it might be expected that their views would not be 
 widely divergent. Among the opinions which they hold in 
 common, only the principal need be mentioned. 
 
 According to both, then, poetry is the first of didactic 
 agencies, in time as well as in order of importance, and, to 
 descend to particulars, outranks both history and philosophy, 
 each of which, in its infancy, embodies something of its great 
 predecessor. It is true that the philosophy which Sidney 
 has in mind is ethics, while Shelley is thinking rather of 
 political science, but this difference is merely indicative of 
 the period ; that which was academic and general in the 
 sixteenth century had become democratic and specifically 
 sociological by the beginning of the nineteenth. Again, 
 while they pronounce poetry to be the first of didactic 
 agencies, neither writer will allow that the poetry which 
 studiously and incessantly reminds us of its moral aim has a 
 right to a place among the highest. 
 
 They agree that there is something prophetic about 
 poetry ; the poet has the " vision and the faculty divine." 
 Accordingly there is much poetry in the Bible. Moreover,
 
 xviii INTR OD UCTION. 
 
 the insight of the true seer cannot be acquired through scho- 
 lastic discipline ; there is a sense in which the poet must be 
 born to his lofty mission. 
 
 It is not necessary that poetry take the form of verse, 
 although, since harmony is the soul of poetry, numbers con- 
 stitute the usual and fitting body to this soul. Plato is in- 
 stanced by both as a prose-poet, or, if the phrase be preferred, 
 as a prosaist whose substance is poetical. 
 
 Again, poetic art improves upon nature ; the world of the 
 poet is a fairer one than was ever seen by mortal eye, and 
 hence his imagined world may well become the foundation of 
 the actual one, the type which men seek to realize. Not 
 only is such endeavor at realization possible, but, as an 
 historical fact, men have taken the figments of the poets for 
 models, Homer being an instance in point. The truth re- 
 vealed by poetry is infinitely attractive, but can only be seen 
 by ordinary men in the creations of the bard ; the latter are 
 therefore true in the deepest sense, and fictitious only in the 
 superficial one. Finally, the test of poetry is its delightful- 
 ness in combination with its didactic efficacy and elevation ; 
 let it fail of either, and it must at once be consigned to a 
 lower rank as poetry, or be denied that name altogether ; 
 
 Omne tulit punctum qui miscuit utile dulci 
 Lectorem delectando pariterque monendo. 
 
 Notwithstanding a concurrence of view extending to so 
 many particulars, it must not be inferred that Shelley's essay 
 is a mere reproduction of Sidney's. Even in poetic endow- 
 ment they were unlike, and no less in education and tempera- 
 ment. Sidney was trained in a severer school than Shelley, 
 issuing from it more cautious, more sober, one is tempted 
 to say, more prosaic. By disposition and training, Shelley 
 was rather Hellenic, Sidney rather Roman. Sidney followed 
 of preference the matter-of-fact Aristotle, while Shelley was 
 more admiringly attached to the ardent and soaring Plato,
 
 INTRODUCTION. xi x 
 
 not the Plato of the Republic, but him of the Ion and the Sym~ 
 posium. In considering the ancient drama, Shelley has his 
 eye upon the Athenians, Sidney upon Seneca and Plautus. 
 His acquaintance with Greek literature enabled Shelley to 
 assume toward Roman poetry the attitude of a stern but 
 upright judge ; this is shown as well in his appreciation of 
 Lucretius as in his estimate of the general literary inferiority 
 of the Romans, and in his censure of the Alexandrianism 
 upon which no small part of the Latin poetry was nourished. 
 The moral instruction which poetry should impart appears, 
 according to Sidney, to be, as it were, mechanipally suspended 
 in the liquid mass of poetry ; according to Stowey, the bub- 
 bling wellspring of poetry is highly charged with secret 
 medicinal virtue, which renders still more agreeable the 
 medium by which it is conveyed. The one seeks to disguise 
 a wholesome bitterness ; the other is conscious of nothing 
 but an exhilarating and healthful potency. Sidney, in his 
 utilitarian vein, can condescend to speak of the mnemonic 
 value of verse. He presents himself before us as an ad- 
 vocate holding a brief for a discredited client, and seeking 
 to convince by any fair means, even to the sacrifice of the 
 defendant's dignity. His eloquence is forensic and practical, 
 like the literary genius of Rome. It deals with the tangible, 
 the ponderable ; with it he descends into the arena in order 
 to conquer. Once there, if his adversary's armor resist the 
 keen thrust of his sword, he is willing, like a Homeric hero, 
 to cast about for some convenient boulder with which to 
 crush him. Shelley, on the other hand, disdains to leave the 
 empyrean. Thence if he hurl a missile, it shall be the bolt 
 of Jove, which dazzles while it smites. To his glance the 
 farthest horizons are simultaneously disclosed. Accordingly, 
 he recognizes the identity of poetry with invention ; with 
 every species of fine art ; with the prescience of great law- 
 givers ; with an intuitional philosophy ; with vision which, 
 in the poverty of language, we call prophetic, but which is 
 really timeless, affirmatory of an eternal Now.
 
 xx INTRODUCTION. 
 
 Shelley's historical perspective is larger and juster than 
 Sidney's ; he sees the ages unroll the panoramic destinies of 
 the race, and marks the elements of renewal and decay. He 
 gazes critically at the past, and hopefully into the future. 
 Sidney could not see a decade in advance, could not even 
 discern the youthful Shakespeare ; Shelley virtually foresaw 
 the whole transcendental movement in England and America, 
 with the train of beneficial effects by which it was to be ac- 
 companied. In a word and a figure, if Sidney is mounted 
 on a strong and active steed, it is still of mortal strain, while 
 Shelley is aloft on Pegasus, and scarcely condescends to 
 touch the ground in his airy flight. 
 
 3. THE PROVINCES OF INSPIRATION AND OF LABOR. 
 
 In one point of the highest importance Shelley has per- 
 haps expressed himself too strongly. Speaking of the im- 
 potence of the will in the production of poetry, he explains 
 (p. 39) : "I appeal to the greatest poets of the present day 
 whether it is not an error to assert that the finest passages 
 of poetry are produced by labor and study. The toil and 
 the delay recommended by critics can be justly interpreted 
 to mean no more than a careful observation of the inspired 
 moments, and an artificial connection of the spaces between 
 their suggestions by the intertexture of conventional expres- 
 sions." 
 
 The decision in this matter is one that can be given by 
 none so well as by the poets themselves. What testimony 
 is borne by the ancients, and what by the moderns ? If it 
 were possible to compare the utterances of men so various 
 as Pindar, Horace, Dante, Milton, Goethe, Schiller, Burns, 
 and Shelley himself Shelley the artist rather than Shelley 
 the theorist it would seem that the question might be 
 settled. 
 
 Pindar is usually regarded as the type of the fiery and
 
 INTR OD UC TION. xx i 
 
 impassioned poet. In certain of his odes he characterizes 
 his own processes. Do these exclude labor and study? 
 According to that most accomplished and poetic of his 
 editors, Professor Gildersleeve, it is quite otherwise (p. 
 xxxvi) : " Of the richness of his workmanship none is better 
 aware than he. The work of the poet is a Daedalian work, 
 and the sinuous folds are wrought with rare skill (O. i, 105), 
 the art of art is selection and adornment, the production of 
 a rich and compassed surface (P. 9, 83). The splendor of 
 the Goddesses of Triumphal Song irradiates him (P. 9, 97), 
 and he is a leader in the skill of poesy, which to him is by 
 eminence wisdom (o-o^ta), wisdom in the art of the theme, 
 and in the art of the treatment." And again (p. xliii) : 
 " Pindar is a jeweller, his material gold and ivory, and his 
 chryselephantine work challenges the scrutiny of the micro- 
 scope, invites the study that wearies not day or night in 
 exploring the recesses in which the artist has held his art 
 sequestered invites the study and rewards it." 
 
 To the same effect is the judgment of Croiset, the author 
 of a fascinating book entitled La Poesie de Pindare (pp. 
 153-5): "From what precedes it will be sufficiently clear 
 that we should be forming a totally false notion of Greek 
 lyric poetry, if, in conformity with certain modem prepos- 
 sessions, we supposed it to be the product of unreasoning 
 impulse and blind inspiration. Nothing is less artless, in 
 one way, than the fine frenzy of the Greek lyric. In these 
 show-pieces of his art, the poet has but a general and remote 
 interest in the things of which he is discoursing. It is solely 
 by means of the imagination, and in a manner wholly artifi- 
 cial, that he succeeds in arousing his own emotional activity. 
 Friendship, gratitude for open-handed hospitality, even piety 
 in its stated and formal manifestations, are not sentiments 
 which can ravish the poet out of his self-possession ; and 
 we can attribute still less influence to the stipulated fee, 
 often the immediate cause of his strains. There are a thou-
 
 xxii INTRODUCTION. 
 
 sand proprieties for him to observe. He must possess tact 
 and pliancy of spirit which shall be equal to every occasion. 
 Nothing is more difficult than to eulogize gracefully, and 
 precisely in this the whole art of the lyric poet consists. 
 Whether gods or men form his subject, praise is his exclu- 
 sive concern. Hence it is deep and continuous reflection, 
 not ecstasy of any sort, which will conduct him to his goal. 
 If ecstasy has any share in the production, it is chiefly in 
 the final working up of his materials, after art and learning 
 have foreseen everything, calculated and disposed every- 
 thing, with reference to the effect intended. 
 
 " To all this the lyric poets paid full heed. In the preced- 
 ing pages we have already passed in review a considerable 
 number of Pindar's verses which contain allusions to laws 
 by which he felt himself bound. At other times he pretends 
 to lose his way, then checks and corrects himself, and 
 leads his chariot back again into the right road, and by so 
 doing furnishes the proof that even his poetic rapture 
 never ceases to keep watch over itself. The lyric poets 
 often allude to reefs on which they must beware of shatter- 
 ing their harks. Now the danger is one of excessive length, 
 now of a superfluity of praise, again of triteness or monotony. 
 Consummate skill is necessary in order to avoid these perils. 
 Nothing is less like a wild and headlong career than this 
 circumspect advance, so mindful of all its steps in the midst 
 of its superb dignity and magnificent speed. The lyric poet 
 calls himself a cunning workman, a craft-master, for so we 
 may translate the Greek words <ro</>ds and <ro<<.o-T??s which 
 Pindar employs. He speaks of his talent as readily as of 
 his Muse. He is fully conscious of his art and prides him- 
 self upon it. It is not through some chance inspiration that 
 he brings to light such marvels : it is through a science 
 which is perfectly master of itself, through an art which adds 
 to the gifts of the Graces and the Muses that which is no 
 less necessary, experience and craftsmanship. The poet's
 
 INTRODUCTION. xxiii 
 
 inspiration is subject to laws, to fixed rules. These he must 
 know and to these he must submit." 
 
 Of Horace, generally esteemed the calmer and saner 
 mind, the dictum is well-known (Art of Poetry, 408-411) : 
 " Whether by genius or by art an excellent poem is produced, 
 has often been the question ; but I do not see what can be 
 done by study without a rich vein of intellect, nor by 
 genius when uncultivated ; so true is it that either requires 
 the help of either, and that the two combine in friendly 
 union." 
 
 Dante has been quoted in the note to the passage. 
 Milton, though in a quite different form of words, virtually 
 echoes the Horatian sentiment (Reason of Church Govern- 
 ment} : " I began thus far to assent both to them and divers 
 of my friends here at home, and not less to an inward 
 prompting which now grew daily upon me, that by labor and 
 intense study, which I take to be my portion in this life, 
 joined with the strong propensity of nature, I might perhaps 
 leave something so written to aftertimes, as they should not 
 willingly let it die. ... I applied myself to that resolution 
 which Ariosto followed against the persuasions of Bembo, to 
 fix all the industry and art I could unite to the adorning of 
 my native tongue. . . . Nor to be obtained by the invoca- 
 tion of Dame Memory and her siren daughters, but by devout 
 prayer to that eternal Spirit who can enrich with all utter- 
 ance and knowledge, and sends out his seraphim with the 
 hallowed fire of his altar, to touch and purify the lips of 
 whom he pleases. To this must be added industrious and 
 select reading, steady observation, insight into all seemly and 
 generous arts and affairs." 
 
 Goethe might be quoted in favor of the extreme view, and 
 might even be thought to go further than Shelley himself 
 (Eckermann, March n, 1828) : " No productiveness of the 
 highest kind, no remarkable discovery, no great thought 
 which bears fruit and has results, is in the power of any one ;
 
 xxiv INTR OD UC TION. 
 
 such things are elevated above all earthly control. Man 
 must consider them as an unexpected gift from above, as 
 the pure efflux of divine grace which he must receive and 
 venerate with joyful thanks. They are akin to the 8at/xov, or 
 genius of life, which does with him what it pleases, and to 
 which he unconsciously resigns himself, whilst he believes he 
 is acting from his own impulse. In such cases, man may 
 best be considered as an instrument in the higher govern- 
 ment of the world, as a vessel found worthy for the recep- 
 tion of a divine influence. I say this while I consider how 
 often a single thought has given a different form to whole 
 centuries ; and how individual men have, by their expres- 
 sions, imprinted a stamp upon their age, which has remained 
 uneffaced, and has operated beneficially upon many succeed- 
 ing generations." But against this must be alleged evidence 
 tending to correct such an impression (Letter to Schiller, 
 April 19, 1797) : "Some verses in Homer, which are pro- 
 nounced to be certainly not genuine and quite new, are of 
 the same kind as some which I myself interpolated into my 
 poem, after it was finished, in order to make the whole 
 clearer and more intelligible, and to prepare "betimes future 
 events. I am very curious to see what I shall be inclined 
 to add to or take from my poem, when I shall have got 
 through with my present studies." 
 
 Of Schiller, Goethe says {Eckermann, Nov. 14, 1823) : 
 " Schiller produced nothing instinctively or unconsciously ; 
 he must reflect upon every step ; therefore he always wished 
 to talk over his literary plans, and has conversed with me 
 about all his later works, piece by piece, as he was writing 
 them." And Schiller describes his own procedure when 
 engaged upon the Song of the Bell (Letter to Goethe, July 
 7> : 79?) : "I nave now gone to work at my bell- founder's 
 song, and since yesterday I have been studying in Kruenitz's 
 Encyclopaedia, out of which I get a great deal of profit. 
 This poem I have much at heart, but it will cost me several
 
 INTRODUCTION. XXV 
 
 weeks, because I need for it so many varieties of moods, 
 and there is a great bulk to be worked up." 
 
 In a bookseller's catalogue of manuscripts I find a quota- 
 tion in point from an alleged autograph letter of Burns, said 
 to bear date of Jan. 22, 1788, which, however, does not 
 appear in any of the published collections in that place. 
 The quotation is : "I have no great faith in the boasted 
 pretensions to intuitive propriety and unlabored elegance. 
 The rough material of fine writing is certainly the gift of 
 genius. But I as firmly believe that the workmanship is the 
 united effort of pains, attention, and repeated trial." 
 
 The principle of composition, as distinguished from direct 
 inspiration, was certainly recognized by Shelley, for he avows 
 that he acted upon it in the writing of Adonais (Letter to 
 Mr. and Mrs. Gisborne, June 5, 1821) : "I have been en- 
 gaged these last days in composing a poem on the death of 
 Keats, which will shortly be finished. ... It is a highly 
 wrought /&? of art, and perhaps better, in point of compo- 
 sition, than anything I have written." 
 
 Perhaps as good a summary as is required may be found 
 in Saintsbury's note on the passage which has called forth 
 this comment (Specimens of English Prose, p. 346) : " There 
 is an obvious fallacy here. The finest passages are not origi- 
 nally inspired by labor and study, but in their finest shape 
 they are the result of labor and study spent on the imme- 
 diate result of inspiration."
 
 A DEFENSE OF POETRY. 
 
 ACCORDING to one mode of regarding those two 
 classes of mental action which are called reason 
 and imagination, the former may be considered as 
 mind contemplating the relations borne by one 
 thought to another, however produced, and the 5 
 latter as mind acting upon those thoughts so as 
 to color them with its own light, and composing 
 from them, as from elements, other thoughts, each 
 containing within itself the principle of its own 
 integrity. The one is the TO jroieiv, or the princi- 10 
 pie of synthesis, and has for its object those forms 
 which are common to universal nature and exist- 
 ence itself ; the other is the TO \oyietv, or principle 
 of analysis, and its action regards the relations of 
 things simply as relations ; considering thoughts 15 
 not in their integral unity, but as the algebraical 
 representations which conduct to certain general 
 results. Reason is the enumeration of quantities 
 already known ; imagination is the perception of 
 the value of those quantities, both separately and 20 
 as a whole. Reason respects the differences, and 
 imagination the similitudes of things. Reason is 
 to imagination as the instrument to the agent, as 
 the body to the spirit, as the shadow to the sub- 
 stance. 25
 
 THE ELEMENTARY POETIC FACULTY. 
 
 Poetry, in a general sense, may be defined to be 
 'the expression of the imagination'; and poetry 
 is connate with the origin of man. Man is an in- 
 strument over which a series of external and inter- 
 
 s nal impressions are driven, like the alternations of 
 an ever-changing wind over an yEolian lyre, which 
 move it by their motion to ever-changing melody. 
 But there is a principle within the human being, 
 and perhaps within all sentient beings, which acts 
 
 10 otherwise than in a lyre, and produces not mel- 
 ody alone, but harmony, by an internal adjustment 
 of the sounds and motions thus excited to the im- 
 pressions which excite them. It is as if the lyre 
 could accommodate its chords to the motions of 
 
 15 that which strikes them, in a determined proportion 
 of sound ; even as the musician can accommodate 
 his voice to the sound of the lyre. A child at play 
 by itself will express its delight by its voice and 
 motions ; and every inflection of tone and every 
 
 20 gesture will bear exact relation to a corresponding 
 antitype in the pleasurable impressions which awak- 
 ened it ; it will be the reflected image of that im- 
 pression ; and as the lyre trembles and sounds 
 after the wind has died away, so the child seeks, 
 
 25 by prolonging in its voice and motions the duration 
 of the effect, to prolong also a consciousness of 
 the cause. In relation to the objects which delight 
 a child, these expressions are what poetry is to 
 higher objects. The savage (for the savage is to 
 
 30 ages what the child is to years) expresses the emo- 
 tions produced in him by surrounding objects in 
 a similar manner ; and language and gesture, to- 
 gether with plastic or pictorial imitation, become
 
 REFLECTS SOCIETY AS WELL AS NATURE. 3 
 
 the image of the combined effect of those objects 
 and his apprehension of them. Man in society, 
 with all his passions and his pleasures, next be- 
 comes the object of the passions and pleasures of 
 man ; an additional class of emotions produces an 5 
 augmented treasure of expression ; and language, 
 gesture, and the imitative arts, become at once the 
 representation and the medium, the pencil and the 
 picture, the chisel and the statue, the chord and 
 the harmony. The social sympathies, or those 10 
 laws from which, as from its elements, society 
 results, begin to develop themselves from the 
 moment that two human beings co-exist ; the 
 future is contained within the present as the plant 
 within the seed ; and equality, diversity, unity, 15 
 contrast, mutual dependence, become the prin- 
 ciples alone capable of affording the motives 
 according to which the will of a social being is 
 determined to action, inasmuch as he is social ; 
 and constitute pleasure in sensation, virtue in sen- 20 
 timent, beauty in art, truth in reasoning, and love 
 in the intercourse of kind. Hence men, even in 
 the infancy of society, observe a certain order in 
 their words and actions, distinct from that of the 
 objects and the impressions represented by them, 
 all expression being subject to the laws of that 
 from which it proceeds. But let us dismiss those 
 more general considerations which might involve 
 an inquiry into the principles of society itself, and 
 restrict our view to the manner in which the imag- 30 
 ination is expressed upon its forms. 
 
 In the youth of the world, men dance and sing 
 and imitate natural objects, observing in these
 
 POETS BY EMINENCE. 
 
 actions, as in all others, a certain rhythm or order. 
 And, although all men observe a similar, they 
 observe not the same order in the motions of the 
 dance, in the melody of the song, in the combina- 
 5 tions of language, in the series of their imitations 
 of natural objects. For there is a certain order 
 or rhythm belonging to each of these classes of 
 mimetic representation, from which the hearer and 
 the spectator receive an intenser and purer pleas- 
 ure than from any other ; the sense of an approxi- 
 mation to this order has been called taste by 
 modern writers. Every man, in the infancy of art, 
 observes an order which approximates more or less 
 closely to that from which this highest delight 
 
 15 results ; but the diversity is not sufficiently marked 
 as that its gradations should be sensible, except in 
 those instances where the predominance of this 
 faculty of approximation to the beautiful (for so 
 we may be permitted to name the relation between 
 
 20 this highest pleasure and its cause) is very great. 
 Those in whom it exists to excess are poets, in the 
 most universal sense of the word ; and the pleasure 
 resulting from the manner in which they express 
 the influence of society or nature upon their own 
 
 z$ minds, communicates itself to others, and gathers 
 
 a sort of reduplication from the community. 
 
 / Their language is vitally metaphorical ; that is, it 
 
 marks the before unapprehended relations of things 
 
 ' and perpetuates their apprehension, until words, 
 
 30 which represent them, become, through time, signs 
 for portions or classes of thought instead of pic- 
 tures of integral thoughts ; and then, if no new 
 poe-ts should arise to create afresh the associations
 
 PRIMITIVE LANGUAGE POETRY. I 
 
 which have been thus disorganized, language will 
 be dead to all the nobler purposes of human inter- 
 course. These similitudes or relations are finely 
 said by Lord Bacon to be " the same footsteps of 
 nature impressed upon the various subjects of the 5 
 world" and he considers the faculty which per- 
 ceives them as the storehouse of axioms common 
 to all knowledge. In the infancy of society every 
 author is necessarily a poet, because language 
 itself is poetry ; and to be a poet is to apprehend 10 
 the true and the beautiful, in a word, the good 
 which exists in the relation subsisting, first be- 
 tween existence and perception, and secondly be- 
 tween perception and expression. Every original 
 language near to its source is in itself the chaos of 15 
 a cyclic poem ; the copiousness of lexicography 
 and the distinctions of grammar are the works of 
 a later age, and are merely the catalogue and the 
 forms of the creations of poetry. 
 
 But poets, or those who imagine and express 20 
 this indestructible order, are not only the authors 
 of language and of music, of the dance, and archi- 
 tecture, and statuary, and painting : they are the 
 institutors of laws, and the founders of civil soci- 
 ety, and the inventors of the arts of life, and the 25 
 teachers who draw into a certain propinquity with 
 the beautiful and the true that partial apprehen- 
 sion of the agencies of the invisible world which / 
 is called religion. Hence all original religions are 
 allegorical, or susceptible of allegory, and, like 30 
 Janus, have a double face of false and true. Poets, 
 according to the circumstances of the age and 
 nation in which they appeared, were called, in the
 
 ) POETS BOTH LEGISLATORS AND PROPHETS. 
 
 earlier epochs of the world, legislators or prophets ; 
 a poet essentially comprises and unites both these 
 characters. For he not only beholds intensely 
 the present as it is, and discovers those laws accord- 
 5 ing to which present things ought to be ordered, 
 but he beholds the future in the present, and his 
 thoughts are the germs of the flower and the fruit 
 of latest time. Not that I assert poets to be 
 prophets in the gross sense of the word, or that 
 
 10 they can foretell the form as surely as they fore- 
 know the spirit of events ; such is the pretence of 
 superstition, which would make poetry an attribute 
 of prophecy, rather than prophecy an attribute of 
 poetry. A poet participates in the eternal, the 
 
 15 infinite, and the one ; as far as relates to his con- 
 ceptions, time and place and number are not. The 
 grammatical forms which express the moods of 
 time, and the difference of persons, and the dis- 
 tinction of place, are convertible with respect to 
 
 20 the highest poetry without injuring it as poetry ; 
 and the choruses of yEschylus, and the Book of 
 Job, and Dante's Paradise, would afford, more than 
 any other writings, examples of this fact, if the 
 limits of this essay did not forbid citation. The 
 
 25 creations of music, sculpture, and painting are 
 illustrations still more decisive. 
 
 Language, color, form, and religious and civil 
 habits of action, are all the instruments and mate- 
 rials of poetry ; they may be called poetry by that 
 
 30 figure of speech which considers the effect as a 
 synonym of the cause. But poetry in a more 
 restricted sense expresses those arrangements of 
 language, and especially metrical language, which
 
 POETRY IN THE LIMITED SENSE. 
 
 are created by that imperial faculty whose throne 
 is curtained within the invisible nature of man. 
 And this springs from the nature itself of lan- 
 guage, which is a more direct representation of the 
 actions and passions of our internal being, and is 5 
 susceptible of more various and delicate combina- 
 tions, than color, form, or motion, and is more plas- 
 tic and obedient to the control of that faculty of 
 which it is the creation. For language is arbitra- 
 rily produced by the imagination, and has relation 
 to thoughts alone ; but all other materials, instru- 
 ments, and conditions of art have relations among 
 each other, which limit and interpose between con- 
 ception and expression. The former is as a mirror 
 which reflects, the latter as a cloud which enfeebles, 15 
 the light of which both are mediums of communi- 
 cation. Hence the fame of sculptors, painters, 
 and musicians, although the intrinsic powers of the 
 great masters of these arts may yield in no degree 
 to that of those who have employed language as 20 
 the hieroglyphic of their thoughts, has never 
 equalled that of poets in the restricted sense of 
 the term ; as two performers of equal skill will 
 produce unequal effects from a guitar and a harp. 
 The fame of legislators and founders of religions, 25 
 so long as their institutions last, alone seems to 
 exceed that of poets in the restricted sense ; but 
 it can scarcely be a question, whether, if we deduct 
 the celebrity which their flattery of the gross 
 opinions of the vulgar usually conciliates, together 3 
 with that which belonged to them in their higher 
 character of poets, any excess will remain. 
 
 We have thus circumscribed the word poetry
 
 8 UNMETRICAL POETRY. 
 
 within the limits of that art which is the most 
 familiar and the most perfect expression of the 
 faculty itself. It is necessary, however, to make 
 the circle still narrower, and to determine the dis- 
 5 tinction between measured and unmeasured lan- 
 guage ; for the popular division into prose and 
 verse is inadmissible in accurate philosophy. 
 
 Sounds as well as thoughts have relation both 
 between each other and towards that which they 
 
 10 represent, and a perception of the order of those 
 relations has always been found connected with a 
 perception of the order of the relations of thoughts. 
 Hence the language of poets has ever affected a 
 sort of uniform and harmonious recurrence of 
 
 15 sound, without which it were not poetry, and 
 which is scarcely less indispensable to the com- 
 munication of its influence than the words them- 
 selves without reference to that peculiar order. 
 Hence the vanity of translation ; it were as wise 
 
 20 to cast a violet into a crucible that you might dis- 
 cover the formal principles of its color and odor, as 
 seek to transfuse from one language into another 
 the creations of a poet. The plant must spring 
 again from its seed, or it will bear no flower and 
 
 *5 this is the burthen of the curse of Babel. 
 
 An observation of the regular mode of the 
 recurrence of harmony in the language of poetical 
 minds, together with its relation to music, produced 
 metre, or a certain system of traditional forms of 
 
 50 harmony and language. Yet it is by no means 
 essential that a poet should accommodate his lan- 
 guage to this traditional form, so that the harmony, 
 which is its spirit, be observed. The practice is
 
 PLATO AND BACON WERE POETS. 9 
 
 indeed convenient and popular, and to be preferred 
 especially in such composition as includes much 
 action ; but every great poet must inevitably inno- 
 vate upon the example of his predecessors in the 
 exact structure of his peculiar versification. The s 
 distinction between poets and prose writers is a 
 vulgar error. The distinction between philos- 
 ophers and poets has been anticipated. Plato was 
 essentially a poet the truth and splendor of his 
 imagery, and the melody of his language, are the 10 
 most intense that it is possible to conceive. He 
 rejected the harmony of the epic, dramatic, and 
 lyrical forms, because he sought to kindle a har- 
 mony in thoughts divested of shape and action, 
 and he forbore to invent any regular plan of rhythm 15 
 which would include, under determinate forms, the 
 varied pauses of his style. Cicero sought to imi- 
 tate the cadence of his periods, but with little suc- 
 cess. Lord Bacon was a poet. His language has 
 a sweet and majestic rhythm which satisfies the 20 
 sense, no less than the almost superhuman wisdom 
 of his philosophy satisfies the intellect ; it is a 
 strain which distends and then bursts the circum- 
 ference of the reader's mind, and pours itself forth 
 together with it into the universal element with 25 
 which it has perpetual sympathy. All the authors 
 of revolutions in opinion are not only necessarily 
 poets as they are inventors, nor even as their words 
 unveil the permanent analogy of things by images 
 which participate in the life of truth ; but as their 30 
 periods are harmonious and rhythmical, and contain 
 in themselves the elements of verse; being the 
 echo of the eternal music. Nor are those supreme
 
 10 POETRY SUPERIOR TO HISTORY. 
 
 poets, who have employed traditional forms of 
 rhythm on account of the form and action of their 
 subjects, less capable of perceiving and teaching 
 the truth of things, than those who have omitted 
 5 that form. Shakespeare, Dante, and Milton (to 
 confine ourselves to modern writers) are philos- 
 ophers of the very loftiest power. 
 
 A poem is the very image of life expressed in its 
 eternal truth. There is this difference between a 
 I 10 story and a poem, that a story is a catalogue of 
 detached facts, which have no other connection 
 than time, place, circumstance, cause and effect ; 
 the other is the creation of actions according to 
 the unchangeable forms of human nature, as exist- 
 
 15 ing in the mind of the creator, which is itself the 
 image of all other minds. The one is partial, and 
 applies only to a definite period of time, and a cer- 
 tain combination of events which can never again 
 recur ; the other is universal, and contains within 
 
 20 itself the germ of a relation to whatever motives 
 or actions have place in the possible varieties of 
 human nature. Time, which destroys the beauty 
 and the use of the story of particular facts, 
 stripped of the poetry which should invest them, 
 
 25 augments that of poetry, and for ever develops new 
 and wonderful applications of the eternal truth 
 which it contains. Hence epitomes have been 
 called the moths of just history; they eat out the 
 poetry of it. A story of particular facts is as a 
 
 30 mirror which obscures and distorts that which 
 should be beautiful ; poetry is a mirror which 
 makes beautiful that which is distorted. 
 
 The parts of a composition may be poetical,
 
 POETRY MUST GIVE PLEASURE. 11 
 
 without the composition as a whole being a poem. 
 A single sentence may be considered as a whole, 
 though it may be found in the midst of a series of 
 unassimilated portions ; a single word even may 
 be a spark of inextinguishable thought. And thus 
 all the great historians, Herodotus, Plutarch, Livy, 
 were poets ; and although the plan of these writers, 
 especially that of Livy, restrained them from 
 developing this faculty in its highest degree, they 
 made copious and ample amends for their subjec- 10 
 tion, by filling all the interstices of their subjects 
 with living images. 
 
 Having determined what is poetry, and who are 
 poets, let us proceed to estimate its effects upon 
 society. 15 
 
 Poetry is ever accompanied with pleasure : all 
 spirits on which it falls open themselves to receive 
 the wisdom which is mingled with its delight. In 
 the infancy of the world, neither poets themselves 
 nor their auditors are fully aware of the excellency 2 
 of poetry, for it acts in a divine and unappre- 
 hended manner, beyond and above consciousness ; 
 and it is reserved for future generations to contem- 
 plate and measure the mighty cause and effect in 
 all the strength and splendor of their union. Even 25 
 in modern times, no living poet ever arrived at the 
 fulness of his fame ; the jury which sits in judg- 
 ment upon a poet, belonging as he does to all time, 
 must be composed of his peers ; it must be impan- 
 elled by Time from the selectest of the wise of 30 
 many generations. A poet is a nightingale, who 
 sits in darkness and sings to cheer its own solitude 
 with sweet sounds ; his auditors are as men en-
 
 12 POETRY MUST ELEVATE. 
 
 tranced by the melody of an unseen musician, who 
 feel that they are moved and softened, yet know 
 not whence or why. The poems of Homer and 
 his contemporaries were the delight of infant 
 5 Greece ; they were the elements of that social sys- 
 tem which is the column upon which all succeeding 
 civilization has reposed. Homer embodied the 
 ideal perfection of his age in human character ; 
 nor can we doubt that those who read his verses 
 
 10 were awakened to an ambition of becoming like 
 to Achilles, Hector, and Ulysses ; the truth and 
 beauty of friendship, patriotism, and persevering 
 devotion to an object, were unveiled to their depths 
 in these immortal creations ; the sentiments of the 
 
 15 auditors must have been refined and enlarged by a 
 sympathy with such great and lovely impersona- 
 tions, until from admiring they imitated, and from 
 imitation they identified themselves with the objects 
 of their admiration. Nor let it be objected that 
 
 20 these characters are remote from moral perfection, 
 and that they are by no means to be considered as 
 edifying patterns for general imitation. Every 
 epoch, under names more or less specious, has 
 deified its peculiar errors ; Revenge is the naked 
 
 25 idol of the worship of a semi-barbarous age ; and 
 Self-deceit is the veiled image of unknown evil, 
 before which luxury and satiety lie prostrate. But 
 a poet considers the vices of his contemporaries as 
 the temporary dress in which his creations must be 
 
 30 arrayed, and which cover without concealing the 
 eternal proportions of their beauty. An epic or 
 dramatic personage is understood to wear them 
 around his soul, as he may the ancient armor or
 
 POETRY SUPERIOR TO ETHICS. 13 
 
 modern uniform around his body ; whilst it is easy 
 to conceive a dress more graceful than either. The 
 beauty of the internal nature can not be so far con- 
 cealed by its accidental vesture, but that the spirit 
 of its form shall communicate itself to the very 5 
 disguise, and indicate the shape it hides from the 
 manner in which it is worn. A majestic form and 
 graceful motions will express themselves through 
 the most barbarous and tasteless costume. Few 
 poets of the highest class have chosen to exhibit 10 
 the beauty of their conceptions in its naked truth 
 and splendor ; and it is doubtful whether the alloy 
 of costume, habit, etc., be not necessary to tem- 
 per this planetary music for mortal ears. 
 
 The whole objection, however, of the immorality 15 
 of poetry rests upon a misconception of the man- 
 ner in which poetry acts to produce the moral 
 improvement of man. Ethical science arranges 
 the elements which poetry has created, and pro- 
 pounds schemes and proposes examples of civil 20 
 and domestic life ; nor is it for want of admirable 
 doctrines that men hate, and despise, and censure, 
 and deceive, and subjugate one another. But poe- 
 try acts in another and diviner manner. It awakens 
 
 J 
 
 and enlarges the mind itself by rendering it the 25 
 receptacle of a thousand unapprehcnded combina- 
 tions of thought. Poetry lifts the veil from the 
 hidden beauty of the world, and makes familiar 
 objects be as if they were not familiar ; it repro- 
 duces all that it represents, and the impersonations 30 
 clothed in its Elysian light stand thenceforward in 
 the minds of those who have once contemplated 
 them, as memorials of that gentle and exalted con-
 
 14 POETRY WORKS THROUGH LOVE. 
 
 tent which extends itself over all thoughts and 
 actions with which it co-exists. The great secret 
 of morals is love ; or a going out of our own nature, 
 and an identification of ourselves with the beauti- 
 
 5 ful which exists in thought, action, or person, not 
 our own. A man, to be greatly good, must imag- 
 ine intensely and comprehensively ; he must put 
 himself in the place of another and of many 
 others ; the pains and pleasures of his species must 
 
 10 become his own. The great instrument of moral 
 good is the imagination ; and poetry administers to 
 the effect by acting upon the cause. Poetry en- 
 larges the circumference of the imagination by 
 replenishing it with thoughts of ever new delight, 
 
 15 which have the power of attracting and assimi- 
 lating to their own nature all other thoughts, and 
 which form new intervals and interstices whose 
 /oid for eve,r craves fresh food. Poetry strengthens 
 the faculty which is the organ of the moral nature 
 
 20 of man, in the same manner as exercise strength- 
 ens a limb. A poet therefore would do ill to 
 embody his own conceptions of right and wrong, 
 which are usually those of his place and time, in 
 his poetical creations, which participate in neither. 
 
 25 By this assumption of the inferior office of inter- 
 preting the effect, in which perhaps after all he 
 might acquit himself but imperfectly, he would 
 resign a glory in the participation of the cause. 
 There was little danger that Homer, or any of the 
 
 30 eternal poets, should have so far misunderstood 
 themselves as to have abdicated this throne of 
 their widest dominion. Those in whom the poet- 
 ical faculty, though great, is less intense, as Euri-
 
 THE DRAMA AND LYRIC AT ATHENS. 15 
 
 pides, Lucan, Tasso, Spenser, have frequently 
 affected a moral aim, and the effect of their poetry 
 is diminished in exact proportion to the degree in 
 which they compel us to advert to this purpose. 
 
 Homer and the cyclic poets were followed at a 5 
 certain interval by the dramatic and lyrical poets of 
 Athens, who flourished contemporaneously with 
 all that is most perfect in the kindred expressions 
 of the poetical faculty : architecture, painting, music, 
 the dance, sculpture, philosophy, and we may add, 10 
 the forms of civil life. For although the scheme 
 of Athenian society was deformed by many imper- 
 fections which the poetry existing in chivalry and 
 Christianity has erased from the habits and insti- 
 tutions of modern Europe ; yet never at any other 15 
 period has so much energy, beauty, and virtue 
 been developed ; never was blind strength and 
 stubborn form so disciplined and rendered subject 
 to the will of man, or that will less repugnant to 
 the dictates of the beautiful and the true, as during 20 
 the century which preceded the death of Socrates. 
 Of no other epoch in the history of our species 
 have we records and fragments stamped so visibly 
 with the image of the divinity in man. But it is 
 poetry alone, in form, in action, and in language, 25 
 which has rendered this epoch memorable above all 
 others, and the storehouse of examples to everlast- 
 ing time. For written poetry existed at that epoch 
 simultaneously with the other arts, and it is an idle 
 inquiry to demand which gave and which received 30 
 the light, which all, as from a common focus, have 
 scattered over the darkest periods of succeeding 
 time. We know no more of cause and effect than
 
 16 DRAMATIC REPRESENTATION AT ATHENS. 
 
 a constant conjunction of events ; poetry is ever 
 found to co-exist with whatever other arts contrib- 
 ute to the happiness and perfection of man. I 
 appeal to what has already been established to dis- 
 
 s tinguish between the cause and the effect. 
 
 It was at the period here adverted to that the 
 drama had its birth ; and however a succeeding 
 writer may have equalled or surpassed those few 
 great specimens of the Athenian drama which have 
 
 10 been preserved to us, it is indisputable that the art 
 itself never was understood or practised according 
 to the true philosophy of it, as at Athens. For 
 the Athenians employed language, action, music, 
 painting, the dance, and religious institution, to 
 
 15 produce a common effect in the representation of 
 the highest idealisms of passion and of power ; 
 each division in the art was made perfect in its 
 kind by artists of the most consummate skill, and 
 was disciplined into a beautiful proportion and 
 
 20 unity one towards the other. On the modern stage 
 a few only of the elements capable of expressing 
 the image of the poet's conception are employed at 
 once. We have tragedy without music and danc- 
 ing, and music and dancing without the highest 
 
 25 impersonations of which they are the fit accom- 
 paniment, and both without religion and solemnity. 
 Religious institution has indeed been usually ban- 
 ished from the stage. Our system of divesting 
 the actor's face of a mask, on which the many 
 
 30 expressions appropriated to his dramatic character 
 might be moulded into one permanent and unchang- 
 ing expression, is favorable only to a partial and 
 inharmonious effect ; it is fit for nothing but a
 
 KING LEAR THE MOST PERFECT DRAMA. 17 
 
 monologue, where all the attention may be directed 
 to^ome great master of ideal mimicry. The mod- 
 ern practice of blending comedy with tragedy, 
 though liable to great abuse in point of practice, is 
 undoubtedly an extension of the dramatic circle ; 5 
 but the comedy should be as in King Lear, univer- 
 sal, ideal, and sublime. It is perhaps the interven- 
 tion of this principle which determines the balance 
 in favor of King Lear against the QEdipus Tyran- 
 nus or the Agamemnon, or, if you will, the trilogies 10 
 with which they are connected ; unless the intense 
 power of the choral poetry, especially that of the 
 latter, should be considered as restoring the equilib- 
 rium. King Lear, if it can sustain this comparison, 
 may be judged to be the most perfect specimen of 15 
 the dramatic art existing in the world, in spite of 
 the narrow conditions to which the poet was sub- 
 jected by the ignorance of the philosophy of the 
 drama which has prevailed in modern Europe. 
 Calderon, in his religious Autos, has attempted to 20 
 fulfil some of the high conditions of dramatic rep- 
 resentation neglected by Shakespeare ; such as the 
 establishing a relation between the drama and 
 religion, and the accommodating them to music 
 and dancing ; but he omits the observation of con- 25 
 ditions still more important, and more is lost than 
 gained by the substitution of the rigidly-defined 
 and ever-repeated idealisms of a distorted supersti- 
 tion for the living impersonations of the truth of 
 human passion. 30 
 
 But I digress. The connection of scenic exhi- 
 bitions with the improvement or corruption of the 
 manners of men has been universally recognized ;
 
 18 MORAL EFFECTS OF TRAGEDY. 
 
 in other words, the presence or absence of poetry 
 in its most perfect and universal form has been 
 found to be connected with good and evil in con- 
 duct or habit. The corruption which has been 
 5 imputed to the drama as an effect begins when 
 the poetry employed in its constitution ends ; I 
 appeal to the history of manners whether the 
 periods of the growth of the one and the decline 
 of the other have not corresponded with an exact- 
 10 ness equal to any example of moral cause and 
 effect. 
 
 The drama at Athens, or wheresoever else it 
 may have approached to its perfection, ever co- 
 existed with the moral and intellectual greatness of 
 15 the age. The tragedies of the Athenian poets are 
 as mirrors in which the spectator beholds himself, 
 under a thin disguise of circumstance, stripped of all 
 but that ideal perfection and energy which every 
 one feels to be the internal type of all that he 
 20 loves, admires, and would become. The imagina- 
 tion is enlarged by a sympathy with pains and 
 passions so mighty, that they distend in their 
 conception the capacity of that by which they are 
 conceived ; the good affections are strengthened by 
 25 pity, indignation, terror and sorrow, and an exalted 
 calm is prolonged from the satiety of this high 
 exercise of them into the tumult of familiar life ; 
 even crime is disarmed of half its horror and all 
 its contagion by being represented as the fatal con- 
 so sequence of the unfathomable agencies of nature ; 
 error is thus divested of its wilfulness ; men can 
 no longer cherish it as the creation of their choice. 
 In the drama of the highest order there is little food
 
 SOCIAL DECAY INFECTS POETRY. 19 
 
 for censure or hatred ; it teaches rather self-knowl- 
 edge and self-respect. Neither the eye nor the 
 mind can see itself, unless reflected upon that 
 which it resembles. The drama, so long as it 
 continues to express poetry, is a prismatic and 5 
 many-sided mirror, which collects the brightest 
 rays of human nature and divides and reproduces 
 them from the simplicity of their elementary 
 forms, and touches them with majesty and beauty, 
 and multiplies all that it reflects, and endows it 10 
 with the power of propagating its like wherever it 
 may fall. 
 
 But in periods of the decay of social life, the 
 drama sympathizes with that decay. Tragedy be- 
 comes a cold imitation of the forms of the great 
 masterpieces of antiquity, divested of all harmo- 
 nious accompaniment of the kindred arts ; and often 
 the very form misunderstood, or a weak attempt to 
 teach certain doctrines which the writer considers 
 as moral truths, and which are usually no more 2 
 than specious flatteries of some gross vice or weak- 
 ness with which the author, in common with his 
 auditors, are infected. Hence what has been called I 
 the classical and domestic drama. Addison's 
 ' Cato ' is a specimen of the one ; and would it 25 
 were not superfluous to cite examples of the other ! 
 To such purposes poetry cannot be made subser- 
 vient. Poetry is a sword of lightning, ever un- 
 sheathed, which consumes the scabbard that would 
 contain it. And hence we observe that all dramatic 30 
 writings of this nature are unimaginative in a sin- 
 gular degree ; they affect sentiment and passion, 
 which, divested of imagination, are other names
 
 20 RESTORATION DRAMA CORRUPT. 
 
 for caprice and appetite. The period in our own 
 history of the grossest degradation of the drama 
 is the reign of Charles II., when all forms in which 
 poetry had been accustomed to be expressed be- 
 s came hymns to the triumph of kingly power over 
 liberty and virtue. Milton stood alone, illuminat- 
 ing an age unworthy of him. At such periods 
 the calculating principle pervades all the forms of 
 dramatic exhibition, and poetry ceases to be 
 
 10 expressed upon them. Comedy loses its ideal uni- 
 versality ; wit succeeds to humor ; we laugh from 
 self-complacency and triumph, instead of pleasure ; 
 malignity, sarcasm, and contempt succeed to sym- 
 pathetic merriment ; we hardly laugh, but we smile. 
 
 15 Obscenity, which is ever blasphemy against the 
 divine beauty in life, becomes, from the very veil 
 which it assumes, more active if less disgusting ; 
 it is a monster for which the corruption of society 
 for ever brings forth new food, which it devours in 
 
 20 secret. 
 
 The drama being that form under which a greater 
 number of modes of expression of poetry are sus- 
 ceptible of being combined than any other, the 
 connection of poetry and social good is more 
 
 25 observable in the drama than in whatever other 
 form. And it is indisputable that the highest per- 
 fection of human society has ever corresponded 
 with the highest dramatic excellence ; and that the 
 corruption or the extinction of the drama in a 
 
 30 nation where it has once flourished, is a mark of a 
 corruption of manners, and an extinction of the 
 energies which sustain the soul of social life. But, 
 as Machiavelli says of political institutions, that
 
 THE ALEXANDRIAN POETRY. 21 
 
 life may be preserved and renewed, if men should 
 arise capable of bringing back the drama to its 
 principles. And this is true with respect to poetry 
 in its most extended sense ; all language, institution 
 and form, require not only to be produced but to be 5 
 sustained ; the office and character of a poet par- 
 ticipates in the divine nature as regards providence, 
 no less than as regards creation. 
 
 Civil war, the spoils of Asia, and the fatal pre- 
 dominance first of the Macedonian, and then of 10 
 the Roman arms, were so many symbols of the 
 extinction or suspension of the creative faculty in 
 Greece. The bucolic writers, who found patronage I 
 under the lettered tyrants of Sicily and Egypt, 1 
 were the latest representatives of its most glorious 15 
 reign. Their poetry is intensely melodious ; like 
 the odor of the tuberose, it overcomes and sickens 
 the spirit with excess of sweetness ; whilst the 
 poetry of the preceding age was as a meadow-gale 
 of June, which mingles the fragrance of all the 20 
 flowers of the field, and adds a quickening and 
 harmonizing spirit of its own which endows the 
 sense with a power of sustaining its extreme 
 delight. The bucolic and erotic delicacy in written 
 poetry is correlative with that softness in statuary, 25 
 music, and the kindred arts, and even in manners 
 and institutions, which distinguished the epoch to 
 which I now refer. Nor is it the poetical faculty 
 itself, or any misapplication of it, to which this 
 want of harmony is to be imputed. An equal sen- 30 
 sibility to the influence of the senses and the affec- 
 tions is to be found in the writings of Homer and 
 Sophocles ; the former, especially, has clothed sen-
 
 22 REDEEMING TRAITS OF IDYLLIC POETRY. 
 
 sual and pathetic images with irresistible attrac- 
 tions. Their superiority over these succeeding 
 writers consists in the presence of those thoughts 
 which belong to the inner faculties of our nature, 
 5 not in the absence of those which are connected 
 with the external ; their incomparable perfection 
 consists in a harmony of the union of all. It is 
 not what the erotic poets have, but what they have 
 not, in which their imperfection consists. It is not 
 10 inasmuch as they were poets, but inasmuch as they 
 were not poets, that they can be considered with 
 any plausibility as connected with the corruption 
 of their age. Had that corruption availed so as to 
 extinguish in them the sensibility to pleasure, pas- 
 is sion, and natural scenery which is imputed to 
 them as an imperfection, the last triumph of evil 
 would have been achieved. For the end of social 
 corruption is to destroy all sensibility to pleasure ; 
 and therefore it is corruption. It begins at the 
 20 imagination and the intellect as at the core, and 
 distributes itself thence as a paralyzing venom 
 through the affections into the very appetites, 
 until all become a torpid mass in which hardly 
 sense survives. At the approach of such a period, 
 25 poetry ever addresses itself to those faculties which 
 are the last to be destroyed, and its voice is heard, 
 like the footsteps of Astraea, departing from the 
 world. Poetry ever communicates all the pleasure 
 which men are capable of receiving ; it is ever still 
 30 the light of life, the source of whatever of beau- 
 tiful or generous or true can have place in an evil 
 time. It will readily be confessed that those 
 among the luxurious citizens of Syracuse and
 
 ROMANS IMPERFECTLY POETIC. 23 
 
 Alexandria who were delighted with the poems of 
 Theocritus were less cold, cruel, and sensual than 
 the remnant of their tribe. But corruption must 
 utterly have destroyed the fabric of human society 
 before poetry can ever cease. The sacred links of 5 
 that chain have never been entirely disjoined, 
 which descending through the minds of many men 
 is attached to those great minds, whence as from 
 a magnet the invisible effluence is sent forth, which 
 at once connects, animates, and sustains the life of 10 
 all. It is the faculty which contains within itself 
 the seeds at once of its own and of social renova- 
 tion. And let us not circumscribe the effects of 
 the bucolic and erotic poetry within the limits of 
 the sensibility of those to whom it was addressed. 15 
 They may have perceived the beauty of those 
 immortal compositions, simply as fragments and 
 isolated portions ; those who are more finely organ- 
 ized, or born in a happier age, may recognize them 
 as episodes to that great poem, which all poets, 20 
 like the co-operating thoughts of one great mind, 
 have built up since the beginning of the world. 
 
 The same revolution within a narrower sphere 
 had place in ancient Rome ; but the actions and 
 forms of its social life never seem to have been 25 
 perfectly saturated with the poetical element. The 
 Romans appear to have considered the Greeks as 
 the selectest treasuries of the selectest forms of 
 manners and of nature, and to have abstained from 
 creating in measured language, sculpture, music, 30 
 or architecture, any thing which might bear a par- 
 ticular relation to their own condition, whilst it 
 should bear a general one to the universal consti-
 
 24 POETRY IN ROMAN INSTITUTIONS. 
 
 tution of the world. But we judge from partial 
 evidence, and we judge perhaps partially. Ennius, 
 Varro, Pacuvius, and Accius, all great poets, have 
 been lost. Lucretius is in the highest, and Virgil 
 
 5 in a very high sense, a creator. The chosen deli- 
 cacy of expressions of the latter are as a mist of 
 light which conceal from us the intense and exceed- 
 ing truth of his conceptions of nature. Livy is 
 instinct with poetry. Yet Horace, Catullus, Ovid, 
 
 10 and generally the other great writers of the Vir- 
 gilian age, saw man and nature in the mirror of 
 Greece. The institutions also, and the religion of 
 Rome, were less poetical than those of Greece, as 
 the shadow is less vivid than the substance. Hence 
 
 15 poetry in Rome seemed to follow, rather than 
 accompany, the perfection of political and domestic 
 society. The true poetry of Rome lived in its 
 institutions ; for whatever of beautiful, of true and 
 majestic, they contained, could have sprung only 
 
 20 from the faculty which creates the order in which 
 they consist. The life of Camillus, the death of 
 Regulus ; the expectation of the senators, in their 
 godlike state, of the victorious Gauls ; the refusal 
 of the republic to make peace with Hannibal after 
 
 25 the battle of Cannae, were not the consequences of 
 a refined calculation of the probable personal 
 advantage to result from such a rhythm and order 
 in the shows of life, to those who were at once the 
 poets and the actors of these immortal dramas. 
 
 3 The imagination beholding the beauty of this 
 order, created it out of itself according to its own 
 idea ; the consequence was empire, and the reward 
 everlasting fame. These things are not the less
 
 CREATIVE IDEAS IN CHRISTIANITY. 25 
 
 poetry qnia carent vate sacro. They are the epi- 
 sodes of that cyclic poem written by Time upon 
 the memories of men. The Past, like an inspired 
 rhapsodist, fills the theatre of everlasting genera- 
 tions with their harmony. 5 
 
 At length the ancient system of religion and 
 manners had fulfilled the circle of its evolutions. 
 And the world would have fallen into utter anarchy 
 and darkness, but that there were found poets 
 among the authors of the Christian and chivalric xo 
 systems of manners and religion, who created 
 forms of opinion and action never before conceived ; 
 which, copied into the imaginations of men, be- 
 came as generals to the bewildered armies of their 
 thoughts. It is foreign to the present purpose to 15 
 touch upon the evil produced by these systems ; 
 except that we protest, on the ground of the prin- 
 ciples already established, that no portion of it can 
 be attributed to the poetry they contain. 
 
 It is probable that the poetry of Moses, Job, 20 
 David, Solomon, and Isaiah had produced a great 
 effect upon the mind of Jesus and his disciples. 
 The scattered fragments preserved to us by the 
 biographers of this extraordinary person are all 
 instinct with the most vivid poetry. But his doc- 2 S 
 trines seem to have been quickly distorted. At a 
 certain period after the prevalence of a system of 
 opinions founded upon those promulgated by him, 
 the three forms into which Plato had distributed 
 the faculties of mind underwent a sort of apothe- 3 
 osis, and became the object of the worship of the 
 civilized world. Here it is to be confessed that 
 "Light" seems to "thicken,"
 
 26 DARK AGES LOST CREATIVE PRINCIPLE. 
 
 And the crow makes wing to the rooky wood; 
 Good things of day begin to droop and drowse, 
 Whiles night's black agents to their preys do rouse. 
 
 But mark how beautiful an order has sprung from 
 s the dust and blood of this fierce chaos ! how the 
 world, as from a resurrection, balancing itself on 
 the golden wings of knowledge and of hope, has 
 reassumed its yet unwearied flight into the heaven 
 of time. Listen to the music, unheard by outward 
 
 10 ears, which is as a ceaseless and invisible wind, 
 nourishing its everlasting course with strength and 
 swiftness. 
 
 The poetry in the doctrines of Jesus Christ, and 
 the mythology and institutions of the Celtic con- 
 
 15 querors of the Roman empire, outlived the dark- 
 ness and the convulsions connected with their 
 growth and victory, and blended themselves in a 
 new fabric of manners and opinion. It is an error 
 to impute the ignorance of the Dark Ages to the 
 
 20 Christian doctrines or the predominance of the 
 Celtic nations. Whatever of evil their agencies 
 may have contained sprang from the 'extinction of 
 the poetical principle, connected with the progress 
 of despotism and superstition. Men, from causes 
 too intricate to be here discussed, had become 
 insensible and selfish ; their own will had become 
 feeble, and yet they were its slaves, and thence the 
 slaves of the will of others ; lust, fear, avarice, 
 cruelty, and fraud, characterized a race amongst 
 
 30 whom no one was to be found capable of creating 
 in form, language, or institution. The moral anom- 
 alies of such a state of society are not justly to be 
 charged upon any class of events immediately con-
 
 BENEFICIAL EFFECTS OF CHRISTIANITY. 27 
 
 nected with them, and those events are most 
 entitled to our approbation which could dissolve it 
 most expeditiously. It is unfortunate for those 
 who cannot distinguish words from thoughts, that 
 many of these anomalies have been incorporated 5 
 into our popular religion. 
 
 It was not until the eleventh century that the 
 effects of the poetry of the Christian and chivalric 
 systems began to manifest themselves. The prin- 
 ciple of equality had been discovered and applied by 10 
 Plato in his Republic, as the theoretical rule of the 
 mode in which the materials of pleasure and of 
 power produced by the common skill and labor of 
 human beings ought to be distributed among them. 
 The limitations of this rule were asserted by him 15 
 to be determined only by the sensibility of each, 
 or the utility to result to all. Plato, following the 
 doctrines of Timaeus and Pythagoras, taught also a 
 moral and intellectual system of doctrine, compre- 
 hending at once the past, the present, and the 2 
 future condition of man. Jesus Christ divulged 
 the sacred and eternal truths contained in these 
 views to mankind, and Christianity, in its abstract 
 purity, became the exoteric expression of the 
 esoteric doctrines of the poetry and wisdom of 25 
 antiquity. The incorporation of the Celtic nations 
 with the exhausted population of the south im- 
 pressed upon it the figure of the poetry existing in 
 their mythology and institutions. The result was 
 a sum of the action and reaction of all the causes 30 
 included in it ; for it may be assumed as a maxim 
 that no nation or religion can supersede any other 
 without incorporating into itself a portion of that
 
 28 THE REVIVAL OF POETRY. 
 
 which it supersedes. The abolition of personal 
 and domestic slavery, and the emancipation of 
 women from a great part of the degrading re- 
 straints of antiquity, were among the consequences 
 5 of these events. 
 
 The abolition of personal slavery is the basis of 
 the highest political hope that it can enter into the 
 mind of man to conceive. The freedom of women 
 produced the poetry of sexual love. Love became 
 
 to a religion, the idols of whose worship were ever 
 present. It was as if the statues of Apollo and 
 the Muses had been endowed with life and motion, 
 and had walked forth among their worshippers ; so 
 that earth became peopled by the inhabitants of a 
 
 15 diviner world. The familiar appearances and pro- 
 ceedings of life became wonderful and heavenly, 
 and a paradise was created as out of the wrecks of 
 Eden. And as this creation itself is poetry, so its 
 creators were poets, and language was the instru- 
 
 20 ment of their art : " Galeotto fu il libro, e chi lo 
 scrisse." The Provencal Trouveurs, or inventors, 
 preceded Petrarch, whose verses are as spells 
 which unseal the inmost enchanted fountains of 
 the delight which is in the grief of love. It is 
 
 25 impossible to feel them without becoming a portion 
 of that beauty which we contemplate ; it were 
 superfluous to explain how the gentleness and 
 elevation of mind connected with these sacred 
 emotions can render men more amiable, more gen- 
 
 30 erous and wise, and lift them out of the dull vapors 
 of the little world of self. Dante understood the 
 secret things of love even more than Petrarch. 
 His Vita. Nuova is an inexhaustible fountain of
 
 THE APOTHEOSIS OF BEATRICE. 29 
 
 purity of sentiment and language ; it is the ideal- 
 ized history of that period and those intervals of 
 his life which were dedicated to love. His apoth- 
 eosis of Beatrice in Paradise, and the gradations of 
 his own love and her loveliness, by which as by s 
 steps he feigns himself to have ascended to the 
 throne of the Supreme Cause, is the most glorious 
 imagination of modern poetry. The acutest critics 
 have justly reversed the judgment of the vulgar 
 and the order of the great acts of the Divina 10 
 Commedia, in the measure of the admiration which 
 they accord to the Hell, Purgatory, and Paradise. 
 The latter is a perpetual hymn of everlasting love. 
 Love, which found a worthy poet in Plato alone of 
 all the ancients, has been celebrated by a chorus of 15 
 the greatest writers of the renovated world ; and 
 the music has penetrated the caverns of society, 
 and its echoes still drown the dissonance of arms 
 and superstition. At successive intervals, Ariosto, 
 Tasso, Shakespeare, Spenser, Calderon, Rousseau, 20 
 and the great writers of our own age, have cele- 
 brated the dominion of love, planting as it were tro- 
 phies in the human mind of that sublimest victory 
 over sensuality and force. The true relation borne 
 to each other by the sexes into which human kind 25 
 is distributed has become less misunderstood ; and 
 if the error which confounded diversity with ine- 
 quality of the powers of the two sexes has been 
 partially recognized in the opinions and institutions 
 of modern Europe, we owe this great benefit to 30 
 the worship of which chivalry was the law, and 
 poets the prophets. 
 
 The poetry of Dante may be considered as the
 
 30 DANTE AND MILTON. 
 
 bridge thrown over the stream of time, which 
 unites the modern and ancient world. The dis- 
 torted notions of invisible things which Dante and 
 his rival Milton have idealized, are merely the 
 5 mask and the mantle in which these great poets 
 walk through eternity enveloped and disguised. It 
 is a difficult question to determine how far they 
 were conscious of the distinction which must have 
 subsisted in their minds between their own creeds 
 
 10 and that of the people. Dante at least appears to 
 wish to mark the full extent of it by placing 
 Riphaeus, whom Virgil calls justissimns unns, in 
 Paradise, and observing a most heretical caprice in 
 his distribution of rewards and punishments. And 
 
 15 Milton's poem contains within itself a philosophical 
 refutation of that system, of which, by a strange 
 and natural antithesis, it has been a chief popular 
 support. Nothing can exceed the energy and mag- 
 nificence of the character of Satan as expressed in 
 
 20 Paradise Lost. It is a mistake to suppose that 
 he could ever have been intended for the popular 
 personification of evil. Implacable hate, patient 
 cunning, and a sleepless refinement of device to 
 inflict the extremest anguish on an enemy, these 
 
 25 things are evil ; and, although venial in a slave, are 
 not to be forgiven in a tyrant ; although redeemed 
 by much that ennobles his defeat in one subdued, 
 are marked by all that dishonors his conquest in 
 the victor. Milton's Devil as a moral being is as 
 
 30 far superior to his God, as one who perseveres in 
 some purpose which he has conceived to be excel- 
 lent, in spite of adversity and torture, is to one who 
 in the cold security of undoubted triumph inflicts
 
 DANTE THE SECOND EPIC POET. 31 
 
 the most horrible revenge upon his enemy, not 
 from any mistaken notion of inducing him to 
 repent of a perseverance in enmity, but with the 
 alleged design of exasperating him to deserve new 
 torments. Milton has so far violated the popular 5 
 creed (if this shall be judged to be a violation) as 
 to have alleged no superiority of moral virtue to 
 his God over his Devil. And this bold neglect of 
 a direct moral purpose is the most decisive proof 
 of the supremacy of Milton's genius. He mingled 10 
 as it were the elements of human nature as colors 
 upon a single pallet, and arranged them in the 
 composition of his great picture according to the 
 laws of epic truth, that is, according to the laws 
 of that principle by which a series of actions of 15 
 the external universe and of intelligent and ethical 
 beings is calculated to excite the sympathy of 
 succeeding generations of mankind. The Divina . 
 Commedia and Paradise Lost have conferred upon 1 
 modern mythology a systematic form ; and when 20' 
 change and time shall have added one more super- 
 stition to the mass of those which have arisen and 
 decayed upon the earth, commentators will be 
 learnedly employed in elucidating the religion of 
 ancestral Europe, only not utterly forgotten be- 25 
 cause it will have been stamped with the eternity 
 of genius. 
 
 Homer was the first and Dante the second epic 
 poet : that is, the second poet, the series of whose 
 creations bore a defined and intelligible relation to 30 
 the knowledge and sentiment and religion of the 
 age in which he lived, and of the ages which fol- 
 lowed it, developing itself in correspondence with
 
 32 MILTON THE THIRD EPIC POET. 
 
 their development. For Lucretius had limed the 
 wings of his swift spirit in the dregs of the sen- 
 sible world ; and Virgil, with a modesty that ill 
 became his genius, had affected the fame of an 
 5 imitator, even whilst he created anew all that he 
 copied ; and none among the flock of mock-birds, 
 though their notes are sweet, Apollonius Rhodius, 
 Quintus (Calaber) Smyrnaeus, Nonnus, Lucan, Sta- 
 tius, or Claudian, have sought even to fulfil a single 
 
 10 condition of epic truth. Milton was the third epic 
 poet. For if the title of epic in its highest sense 
 be refused to the yEneid, still less can it be con- 
 ceded to the Orlando Furioso, the Gerusalemme 
 Liberata, the Lusiad, or the Fairy Queen. 
 
 15 Dante and Milton were both deeply penetrated 
 with the ancient religion of the civilized world, 
 and its spirit exists in their poetry probably in the 
 same proportion as its forms survived in the unre- 
 formed worship of modern Europe. The one pre- 
 
 20 ceded and the other followed the Reformation at 
 almost equal intervals. Dante was the first relig- 
 ious reformer, and Luther surpassed him rather in 
 the rudeness and acrimony, than in the boldness 
 of his censures of papal usurpation. Dante was 
 
 25 the first awakener of entranced Europe ; he 
 created a language, in itself music and persuasion, 
 out of a chaos of inharmonious barbarisms. He 
 was the congregator of those great spirits who pre- 
 sided over the resurrection of learning, the Lucifer 
 
 30 of that starry flock which in the thirteenth cen- 
 tury shone forth from republican Italy, as from a 
 heaven, into the darkness of the benighted world. 
 His very words are instinct with spirit ; each is
 
 DANTE A REFORMER. 33 
 
 as a spark, a burning atom of inextinguishable 
 thought ; and many yet lie covered in the ashes 
 of their birth, and pregnant with a lightning which 
 has yet found no conductor. All high poetry is 
 infinite ; it is as the first acorn, which contained all 5 
 oaks potentially. Veil after veil may be undrawn, 
 and the inmost naked beauty of the meaning never 
 exposed. A great poem is a fountain for ever over- 
 flowing with the waters of wisdom and delight ; 
 and after one person and one age has exhausted all 10 
 its divine effluence which their peculiar relations 
 enable them to share, another and yet another suc- 
 ceeds, and new relations are ever developed, the 
 source of an unforeseen and an unconceived de- 
 light. 15 
 
 The age immediately succeeding to that of 
 Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio, was characterized 
 by a revival of painting, sculpture, and architec- 
 ture. Chaucer caught the sacred inspiration, and 
 the superstructure of English literature is based 2 o 
 upon the materials of Italian invention. 
 
 But let us not be betrayed from a defense into a 
 critical history of poetry and its influence on soci- 
 ety. Be it enough to have pointed out the effects 
 of poets, in the large and true sense of the word, 25 
 upon their own and all succeeding times. 
 
 But poets have been challenged to resign the 
 civic crown to reasoners and mechanists, on an- 
 other plea. It is admitted that the exercise of the 
 imagination is most delightful, but it is alleged 30 
 that that of reason is more useful. Let us exam- 
 ine, as the grounds of this distinction, what is here 
 meant by utility. Pleasure or good, in a general
 
 34 POETS VERSUS REASONERS. 
 
 sense, is that which the consciousness of a sensi- 
 tive and intelligent being seeks, and in which, when 
 found, it acquiesces. There are two kinds of pleas- 
 ure, one durable, universal, and permanent ; the 
 5 other transitory and particular. Utility may either 
 express the means of producing the former or the 
 latter. In the former sense, whatever strengthens 
 and purifies the affections, enlarges the imagination, 
 and adds spirit to sense, is useful. But a narrower 
 
 10 meaning may be assigned to the word utility, con- 
 fining it to express that which banishes the im- 
 portunity of the wants of our animal nature, the 
 surrounding men with security of life, the dispers- 
 ing the grosser delusions of superstition, and the 
 
 15 conciliating such a degree of mutual forbearance 
 among men as may consist with the motives of 
 personal advantage. 
 
 Undoubtedly the promoters of utility, in this 
 limited sense, have their appointed office in society. 
 
 20 They follow the footsteps of poets, and copy the 
 sketches of their creations into the book of com- 
 mon life. They make space and give time. Their 
 exertions are of the highest value, so long as they 
 confine their administration of the concerns of the 
 
 25 inferior powers of our nature within the limits due 
 to the superior ones. But whilst the sceptic 
 destroys gross superstitions, let him spare to de- 
 face, as some of the French writers have defaced, 
 the eternal truths charactered upon the imagina- 
 
 30 tions of men. Whilst the mechanist abridges, and 
 the political economist combines labor, let them 
 beware that their speculations, for want of corre- 
 spondence with those first principles which belong
 
 HIGHEST PLEASURE LINKED WITH PAIN. 35 
 
 to the imagination, do not tend, as they have in 
 modern England, to exasperate at once the ex- / 
 tremes of luxury and of want. They have exempli- 
 fied the saying, " To him that hath, more shall be 
 given ; and from him that hath not, the little that s 
 he hath shall be taken away." The rich have 
 become richer, and the poor have become poorer ; 
 and the vessel of the state is driven between the 
 Scylla and Charybdis of anarchy and despotism. 
 Such are the effects which must ever flow from an 10 
 unmitigated exercise of the calculating faculty. 
 
 It is difficult to define pleasure in its highest 
 sense, the definition involving a number of appar- 
 ent paradoxes. For, from an inexplicable defect of 
 harmony in the constitution of human nature, the 1.5 
 pain of the inferior is frequently connected with \ 
 the pleasures of the superior' portions of our 
 being. Sorrow, terror, anguish, despair itself, are 
 often the chosen expressions of an approximation 
 to the highest good. Our sympathy in tragic fie- 2 c 
 tion depends on this principle ; tragedy delights by 
 affording a shadow of that pleasure which exists in 
 pain. This is the source also of the melancholy 
 which is inseparable from the sweetest melody. 
 The pleasure that is in sorrow is sweeter than the 25 
 pleasure of pleasure itself. And hence the saying, 
 "It is better to go to the house of mourning than 
 to the house of mirth." Not that this highest 
 species of pleasure is necessarily linked with pain. 
 The delight of love and friendship, the ecstasy of 30 
 the admiration of nature, the joy of the percep- 
 tion and still more of the creation of poetry, is 
 often wholly unalloyed.
 
 36 INFERIORITY OF PROSAIC REASONERS. 
 
 The production and assurance of pleasure in 
 this highest sense is true utility. Those who pro- 
 duce and preserve this pleasure are poets or poetical 
 philosophers. 
 
 ' Y The exertions of Locke, Hume, Gibbon, Voltaire, 
 / Rousseau, and their disciples, in favor of oppressed 
 / and deluded humanity, are entitled to the gratitude 
 / of mankind. Yet it is easy to calculate the degree 
 / of moral and intellectual improvement which the 
 / 10 world would have exhibited, had they never lived. 
 A little more nonsense would have been talked for 
 a century or two ; and perhaps a few more men, 
 women, and children burnt as heretics. We might 
 not at this moment have been congratulating each 
 15 other on the abolition of the Inquisition in Spain. 
 But it exceeds all imagination to conceive what 
 would have been the moral condition of the world 
 if neither Dante, Petrarch, Boccaccio, Chaucer, 
 Shakespeare, Calderon, Lord Bacon, nor Milton, 
 20 had ever existed ; if Raphael and Michael Angelo 
 had never been born ; if the Hebrew poetry had 
 \ never been translated ; if a revival of the study of 
 ' Greek literature had never taken place ; if no 
 monuments of ancient sculpture had been handed 
 25 down to us ; and if the poetry of the religion of 
 the ancient world had been extinguished together 
 with its belief. The human mind could never, 
 except by the intervention of these excitements, 
 have been awakened to the invention of the grosser 
 30 sciences, and that application of analytical reason- 
 ing to the aberrations of society which it is now 
 attempted to exalt over the direct expression of the 
 inventive and creative faculty itself.
 
 CALCULATION HAS OUTRUN CONCEPTION. 37 
 
 We have more moral, political, and historical 
 wisdom than we know how to reduce into practice ; 
 we have more scientific and economical knowledge 
 than can be accommodated to the just distribution 
 of the produce which it multiplies. The poetry 5 
 in these systems of thought is concealed by the 
 accumulation of facts and calculating processes. 
 There is no want of knowledge respecting what is 
 wisest and best in morals, government, and political 
 economy, or at least what is wiser and better than 10 
 what men now practise and endure. But we let 
 " / dare not wait upon / would, like the poor cat in 
 the adage." We want the creative faculty to imagine 
 that which we know ; we want the generous im- 
 pulse to act that which we imagine ; we want the 15 
 poetry of life : our calculations have outrun con- 
 ception ; we have eaten more than we can digest. 
 The cultivation of those sciences which have 
 enlarged the limits of the empire of man over the 
 external world, has, for want of the poetical fac- 20 
 ulty, proportionally circumscribed those of the 
 internal world ; and man, having enslaved the ele- 
 ments, remains himself a slave. To what but a 
 cultivation of the mechanical arts in a degree dis- 
 proportioned to the presence of the creative faculty, 25 
 which is the basis of all knowledge, is to be 
 attributed the abuse of all invention for abridging 
 and combining labor, to the exasperation of the 
 inequality of mankind ? From what other cause 
 has it arisen that the discoveries which should have 30 
 lightened, have added a weight to the curse imposed 
 on Adam ? Poetry, and the principle of Self of
 
 38 POETRY LARGER THAN SCIENCE. 
 
 which money is the visible incarnation, are the 
 God and Mammon of the world. 
 
 The functions of the poetical faculty are two- 
 fold : by one it creates new materials of knowledge, 
 
 5 and power, and pleasure ; by the other it engenders 
 in the mind a desire to reproduce and arrange them 
 according to a certain rhythm and order which may 
 be called the beautiful and the good. The cultiva- 
 tion of poetry is never more to be desired than at 
 
 10 periods when, from an excess of the selfish and 
 calculating principle, the accumulation of the 
 materials of external life exceed the quantity of 
 the power of assimilating them to the internal laws 
 of human nature. The body has then become too 
 
 15 unwieldy for that which animates it. 
 
 Poetry is indeed something divine. It is at once 
 the centre and circumference of knowledge; it is 
 that which comprehends all science, and that to 
 which all science must be referred. It is at the 
 
 20 same time the root and blossom of all other sys- 
 tems of thought ; it is that from which all spring, 
 and that which adorns all ; and that which, if 
 
 \ blighted, denies the fruit and the seed, and with- 
 holds from the barren world the nourishment and 
 
 2 5 the succession of the scions of the tree of life. 
 It is the perfect and consummate surface and 
 bloom of all things ; it is as the odor and the color 
 of the rose to the texture of the elements which 
 compose it, as the form and splendor of unfaded 
 
 3 beauty to the secrets of anatomy and corruption. 
 What were virtue, love, patriotism, friendship ; 
 what were the scenery of this beautiful universe 
 which we inhabit ; what were our consolations on
 
 POETRY NOT PRODUCED AT WILL. 39 
 
 this side of the grave, and what were our aspira- 
 tions beyond it, if poetry did not ascend to bring 
 light and fire from those eternal regions where the j 
 owl-winged faculty of calculation dare not ever ' 
 soar ? Poetry is not like reasoning, a power to be 5 
 exerted according to the determination of the 
 will. A man cannot say, "I will compose poetry." 
 The greatest poet even cannot say it ; for the mind 
 in creation is as a fading coal, which some invisible 
 influence, like an inconstant wind, awakens to tran- 10 
 sitory brightness ; this power arises from within, 
 like the color of a flower which fades and changes 
 as it is developed, and the conscious portions of 
 our natures are unprophetic either of its approach 
 or its departure. Could this influence be durable 15 
 in its original purity and force, it is impossible to 
 predict the greatness of the results ; but when 
 composition begins, inspiration is already on the 
 decline, and the most glorious poetry that has ever 
 been communicated to the world is probably a 
 feeble shadow of the original conceptions of the 
 poet. I appeal to the greatest poets of the present 
 day whether it is not an error to assert that the 
 finest passages of poetry are produced by labor and 
 study. The toil .and the delay recommended by 25 
 critics can be justly interpreted to mean no more 
 than a careful observation of the inspired moments, 
 and an artificial connection of the spaces between 
 their suggestions by the intertexture of conven- 
 tional expressions a necessity only imposed by 30 
 the limitedness of the poetical faculty itself ; for 
 Milton conceived the Paradise Lost as a whole 
 before he executed it in portions. We have his
 
 40 VERBAL MOSAIC NOT POETRY. 
 
 own authority also for the muse having " dictated " 
 to him the "unpremeditated song." And let this 
 be an answer to those who would allege the fifty-six 
 various readings of the first line of the Orlando 
 5 Furioso. Compositions so produced are to poetry 
 what mosaic is to painting. The instinct and in- 
 tuition of the poetical faculty is still more observ- 
 able in the plastic and pictorial arts : a great statue 
 or picture grows under the power of the artist as a 
 
 10 child in the mother's womb ; and the very mind 
 which directs the hands in formation, is incapable 
 of accounting to itself for the origin, the grada- 
 tions, or the media of the process. 
 
 Poetry is the record of the best and happiest 
 
 15 moments of the happiest and best minds. We are 
 aware of evanescent visitations of thought and 
 feeling, sometimes associated with place or person, 
 sometimes regarding our own mind alone, and 
 always arising unforeseen and departing unbidden, 
 
 20 but elevating and delightful beyond all expression ; 
 so that even in the desire and the regret they leave, 
 there cannot but be pleasure, participating as it 
 does in the nature of its object. It is as it were 
 the interpenetration of a diviner nature through our 
 
 25 own ; but its footsteps are like, those of a wind 
 over the sea, which the morning calm erases, and 
 whose traces remain only, as on the wrinkled sand 
 which paves it. These and corresponding conditions 
 of being are experienced principally by those of 
 
 30 the most delicate sensibility and the most enlarged 
 imagination ; and the state of mind produced by 
 them is at war with every base desire. The en- 
 thusiasm of virtue, love, patriotism, and friendship
 
 POETRY TRANSMUTES EVIL TO GOOD. 41 
 
 is essentially linked with such emotions ; and 
 whilst they last, self appears as what it is, an atom 
 to a universe. Poets are not only subject to these 
 experiences as spirits of the most refined organiza- 
 tion, but they can color all that they combine with 5 
 the evanescent hues of this ethereal world ; a 
 word, a trait in the representation of a scene or a 
 passion will touch the enchanted chord, and rean- 
 imate, in those who have ever experienced these 
 emotions, the sleeping, the cold, the buried image 10 
 of the past. Poetry thus makes immortal all that 
 is best and most beautiful in the world ; it arrests 
 the vanishing apparitions which haunt the inter- 
 lunations of life, and veiling them or in language 
 or in form, sends them forth among mankind, bear- 15 
 ing sweet news of kindred joy to those with whom 
 their sisters abide abide, because there is no por- 
 tal of expression from the caverns of the spirit 
 which they inhabit into the universe of things. 
 Poetry redeems from decay the visitations of the 20 
 divinity in man. 
 
 Poetry turns all things to loveliness ; it exalts the 
 beauty of that which is most beautiful, and it adds 
 beauty to that which is most deformed ; it marries 
 exultation and horror, grief and pleasure, eternity 25 
 and change ; it subdues to union under its light 
 yoke all irreconcilable things. It transmutes all 
 that it touches, and every form moving within the 
 radiance of its presence is changed by wondrous 
 sympathy to an incarnation of the spirit which it 30 
 breathes ; its secret alchemy turns to potable gold 
 the poisonous waters which flow from death 
 through life ; it strips the veil of familiarity from
 
 42 CREATES THE UNIVERSE ANEW. 
 
 the world, and lays bare the naked and sleeping 
 beauty which is the spirit of its forms. 
 
 All things exist as they are perceived : at least 
 in relation to the percipient. 
 
 5 The mind is its own place, and in itself 
 
 Can make a Heaven of Hell, a Hell of Heaven. 
 
 But poetry defeats the curse which binds us to be 
 subjected to the accident of surrounding impres- 
 sions. And whether it spreads its own figured 
 
 10 curtain, or withdraws life's dark veil from before 
 the scene of things, it equally creates for us a 
 being within our being. It makes us the inhab- 
 itant of a world to which the familiar world is a 
 chaos. It reproduces the common universe of 
 
 15 which we are portions and percipients, and it 
 purges from our inward sight the film of famil- 
 iarity which obscures from us the wonder of our 
 being. It compels us to feel that which we per- 
 ceive, and to imagine that which we know. It 
 
 20 creates anew the universe, after it has been anni- 
 hilated in our minds by the recurrence of impres- 
 sions blunted by reiteration. It justifies the bold 
 and true word of Tasso : Non merita nome di 
 creatore, se non Iddio ed il Poeta. 
 
 25 A poet, as he is the author to others of the high- 
 est wisdom, pleasure, virtue, and glory, so he ought 
 personally to be the happiest, the best, the wisest, 
 and the most illustrious of men. As to his glory, 
 let time be challenged to declare whether the fame 
 
 30 of any other institutor of human life be comparable 
 to that of a poet. That he is the wisest, the hap- 
 piest, and the best, inasmuch as he is a poet, 
 is equally incontrovertible : the greatest poets
 
 POETS BEST, HAPPIEST, AND WISEST. 43 
 
 have been men of the most spotless virtue, of the 
 most consummate prudence, and, if we would look 
 into the interior of their lives, the most fortunate 
 of men ; and the exceptions, as they regard those 
 who possessed the poetic faculty in a high yet 5 
 inferior degree, will be found on consideration to 
 confirm rather than destroy the rule. Let us for a 
 moment stoop to the arbitration of popular breath, 
 and usurping and uniting in our own persons the 
 incompatible characters of accuser, witness, judge, 10 
 and executioner, let us decide without trial, testi- 
 mony, or form, that certain motives of those who 
 are "there sitting where we dare not soar," are 
 reprehensible. Let us assume that Homer was a 
 drunkard, that Virgil was a flatterer, that Horace 15 
 was a coward, that Tasso was a madman, that Lord 
 Bacon was a peculator, that Raphael was a liber- 
 tine, that Spenser was a poet laureate. It is incon- 
 sistent with this division of our subject to cite 
 living poets, but posterity has done ample justice 2 o 
 to the great names now referred to. Their errors 
 have been weighed and found to have been dust 
 in the balance ; if their sins were as scarlet, 
 they are now white as snow; they have been 
 washed in the blood of the mediator and redeemer, 25 
 Time. Observe in what a ludicrous chaos the im- 
 putations of real or fictitious crime have been con- 
 fused in the contemporary calumnies against poetry 
 and poets ; consider how little is as it appears 
 or appears as it is ; look to your own motives, and 30 
 judge not, lest ye be judged. 
 
 Poetry, as has been said, differs in this respect 
 from logic, that it is not subject to the control of the
 
 44 FRAILTY OF POETS AS MEN. 
 
 active powers of the mind, and that its birth and 
 recurrence have no necessary connection with the 
 consciousness or will. It is presumptuous to deter- 
 mine that these are the necessary conditions of all 
 
 5 mental causation, when mental effects are expe- 
 rienced insusceptible of being referred to them. 
 The frequent recurrence of the poetical power, it 
 is obvious to suppose, may produce in the mind a 
 habit of order and harmony correlative with its 
 
 10 own nature and with its effects upon other minds. 
 But in the intervals of inspiration and they may 
 be frequent without being durable a poet becomes 
 a man, and is abandoned to the sudden reflux of 
 the influences under which others habitually live. 
 
 15 But as he is more delicately organized than other 
 men, and sensible to pain and pleasure, both his 
 own and that of others, in a degree unknown to 
 them, he will avoid the one and pursue the other 
 with an ardor proportioned to this difference. And 
 
 20 he renders himself obnoxious to calumny when he 
 
 neglects to observe the circumstances under which 
 
 these objects of universal pursuit and flight have 
 
 disguised themselves in one another's garments. 
 
 But there is nothing necessarily evil in this 
 
 25 error, and thus cruelty, envy, revenge, avarice, and 
 the passions purely evil, have never formed any por- 
 tion of the popular imputations on the lives of poets. 
 I have thought it most favorable to the cause of 
 truth to set down these remarks according to the 
 
 30 order in which they were suggested to my mind, 
 by a consideration of the subject itself, instead of 
 observing the formality of a polemical reply ; but if 
 the view which they contain be just, they will be
 
 PRETENDERS TO POETRY. 45 
 
 found to involve a refutation of the arguers against 
 poetry, so far at least as regards the first division 
 of the subject. I can readily conjecture what 
 should have moved the gall of some learned and 
 intelligent writers who quarrel with certain versi- s 
 fiers ; I, like them, confess myself unwilling to be 
 stunned by the Theseids of the hoarse Codri of 
 the day. Bavius and Maevius undoubtedly are, as 
 they ever were, insufferable persons. But it be- 
 longs to a philosophical critic to distinguish rather 10 
 than confound. 
 
 The first part of these remarks has related to 
 poetry in its elements and principles ; and it has 
 been shown, as well as the narrow limits assigned 
 them would permit, that what is called poetry in 15 
 a restricted sense, has a common source with all 
 other forms of order and of beauty according to 
 which the materials of human life are susceptible 
 of being arranged, and which is poetry in a uni- / 
 versal sense. 2 o 
 
 The second part will have for its object an appli- 
 cation of these principles to the present state of 
 the cultivation of poetry, and a defense of the 
 attempt to idealize the modern forms of manners 
 and opinions, and compel them into a subordination 25 
 to the imaginative and creative faculty. For the 
 literature of England, an energetic development of 
 which has ever preceded or accompanied a great 
 and free development of the national will, has 
 arisen as it were from a new birth. In spite of the 30 
 low-thoughted envy which would undervalue con- 
 temporary merit, our own will be a memorable age 
 in intellectual achievements, and we live among
 
 46 POETS UNCONSCIOUS MEDIA OF INSPIRATION. 
 
 such philosophers and poets as surpass beyond 
 comparison any who have appeared since the last 
 national struggle for civil and religious liberty. 
 The most unfailing herald, companion, and follower 
 5 of the awakening of a great people to work a ben- 
 eficial change in opinion or institution, is poetry. 
 At such periods there is an accumulation of the 
 power of communicating and receiving intense and 
 impassioned conceptions respecting man and na- 
 
 10 ture. The persons in whom this power resides 
 may often, as far as regards many portions of their 
 nature, have little apparent correspondence with 
 that spirit of good of which they are the ministers. 
 But even whilst they deny and abjure, they are yet 
 
 15 compelled to serve the power which is seated on 
 
 the throne of their own soul. It is impossible to 
 
 r read the compositions of the most celebrated 
 
 writers of the present day without being startled 
 
 with the electric life which burns within their 
 
 20 words. They measure the circumference and sound 
 the depths of human nature with a comprehensive 
 and all-penetrating spirit, and they are themselves 
 perhaps the most sincerely astonished at its mani- 
 festations ; for it is less their spirit than the spirit 
 
 25 of the age. Poets are the hierophants of an unap- 
 prehended inspiration ; the mirrors of the gigantic 
 shadows which futurity casts upon the present; 
 the words which express what they understand 
 not ; the trumpets which sing to battle and feel 
 
 30 not what they inspire ; the influence which is 
 moved not, but moves. Poets are the unacknowl- 
 edged legislators of the world.
 
 THE FOUR AGES OF POETRY. 
 
 BY THOMAS LOVE PEACOCK. 
 
 Qui inter haec nutriuntur non magis sapere possunt, quam bene olere qui in 
 culina habitant. PETRONIUS. 
 
 POETRY, like the world, may be said to have four ages, but 
 in a different order : the first age of poetry being the age of 
 iron ; the second of gold ; the third of silver ; and the fourth 
 of brass. 
 
 The first, or iron age of poetry, is that in which rude bards s 
 celebrate in rough numbers the exploits of ruder chiefs, in 
 days when every man is a warrior, and when the great practi- 
 cal maxim of every form of society, "to keep what we have 
 and to catch what we can," is not yet disguised under names 
 of justice and forms of law, but is the naked motto of the 10 
 naked sword, which is the only judge and jury in every ques- 
 tion of meum and tuum [mine and thine]. In these days, 
 the only three trades flourishing (besides that of priest, which 
 flourishes always) are those of king, thief, and beggar ; the 
 beggar being, for the most part, a king deject, and the thief 15 
 a king expectant. The first question asked of a stranger is, 
 whether he is a beggar or a thief; 1 the stranger, in reply, 
 usually assumes the first, and awaits a convenient opportunity 
 to prove his claim to the second appellation. 
 
 The natural desire of every man to engross to himself as 20 
 much power and property as he can acquire by any of the 
 means which might makes right, is accompanied by the no 
 less natural desire of making known to as many people as 
 possible the extent to which he has been a winner in this 
 universal game. The successful warrior becomes a chief; the 25 
 
 1 See the Odyssey, passim, and Thucydides.I. 5. [Peacock's Note.]
 
 48 THE FOUR AGES OF POETRY. 
 
 successful chief becomes a king ; his next want is an organ 
 to disseminate the fame of his achievements and the extent 
 of his possessions, and this organ he finds in a bard, who is 
 always ready to celebrate the strength of his arm, being first 
 
 5 duly inspired by that of his liquor. This is the origin of 
 poetry, which, like all other trades, takes its rise in the de- 
 mand for the commodity, and flourishes in proportion to the 
 extent of the market. 
 
 Poetry is thus in its origin panegyrical. The first rude 
 
 10 songs of all nations appear to be a sort of brief historical 
 notices, in a strain of tumid hyperbole, of the exploits and 
 possessions of a few pre-eminent individuals. They tell us 
 how many battles such an one has fought, how many helmets 
 he has cleft, how many breastplates he has pierced, how many 
 
 15 widows he has made, how much land he has appropriated, 
 how many houses he has demolished for other people, what 
 a large one he has built for himself, how much gold he has 
 stowed away in it, and how liberally and plentifully he pays, 
 feeds, and intoxicates the divine and immortal bards, the 
 
 20 sons of Jupiter, but for whose everlasting songs the names of 
 heroes would perish. 
 
 This is the first stage of poetry before the invention of 
 written letters. The numerical modulation is at once useful 
 as a help to memory, and pleasant to the ears of uncultured 
 
 25 men, who are easily caught by sound ; and, from the exceeding 
 flexibility of the yet unformed language, the poet does no 
 violence to his ideas in subjecting them to the fetters of 
 number. The savage, indeed, lisps in numbers, and all rude 
 and uncivilized people express themselves in the manner 
 
 3 which we call poetical. 
 
 The scenery by which he is surrounded, and the supersti- 
 tions which are the creed of his age, form the poet's mind. 
 Rocks, mountains, seas, unsubdued forests, unnavigable 
 rivers, surround him with forms of power and mystery, which 
 
 35 ignorance and fear have peopled with spirits, under multifari- 
 ous names of gods, goddesses, nymphs, genii, and daemons. 
 Of all these personages marvelous tales are in existence : the 
 nymphs are not indifferent to handsome young men, and the 
 gentlemen-genii are much troubled and very troublesome
 
 THE FOUR AGES OF POETRY. 49 
 
 with a propensity to be rude to pretty maidens ; the bard, 
 therefore, finds no difficulty in tracing the genealogy of his 
 chief to any of the deities in his neighborhood with whom the 
 said chief may be desirous of claiming relationship. 
 
 In this pursuit, as in all others, some, of course, will attain s 
 a very marked pre-eminence ; and these will be held in high 
 honor, like Demodocus in the Odyssey, and will be conse- 
 quently inflated with boundless vanity, like Thamyris in the 
 Iliad. Poets are as yet the only historians and chroniclers 
 of their time, and the sole depositories of all the knowledge i 
 of their age ; and though this knowledge is rather a crude 
 congeries of traditional fantasies than a collection of use- 
 ful truths, yet, such as it is, they have it to themselves. They 
 are observing and thinking, while others are robbing and 
 fighting ; and though their object be nothing more than to 15 
 secure a share of the spoil, yet they accomplish this end by 
 intellectual, not by physical power ; their success excites 
 emulation to the attainment of intellectual eminence ; thus 
 they sharpen their own wits and awaken those of others, at 
 the same time that they gratify vanity and amuse curiosity. 2 
 A skilful display of the little knowledge they have gains them 
 credit for the possession of much more which they have not. 
 Their familiarity with the secret history of gods and genii 
 obtains for them, without much difficulty, the reputation of 
 inspiration ; thus they are not only historians, but theolo- 25 
 gians, moralists, and legislators ; delivering their oracles ex 
 cathedra [from the chair of authority], and being indeed often 
 themselves (as Orpheus and Amphion) regarded as portions 
 and emanations of divinity ; building cities with a song, and 
 leading brutes with a symphony which are only metaphors 3 
 for the faculty of leading multitudes by the nose. 
 
 The golden age of poetry finds its materials in the age of 
 iron. This age begins when poetry begins to be retrospec- 
 tive ; when something like a more extended system of civil 
 polity is [established ; when personal strength and courage 35 
 avail less to the aggrandizing of their possessor, and to the 
 making and marring of kings and kingdoms, and are checked 
 by organized bodies, social institutions, and hereditary suc- 
 cessions. Men also live more in the light of truth and within
 
 50 THE FOUR AGES OF POETRY. 
 
 the interchange of observation, and thus perceive that the 
 agency of gods and genii is not so frequent among them- 
 selves as, to judge from the songs and legends of the past 
 time, it was among their ancestors. From these two circum- 
 
 5 stances really diminished personal power, and apparently 
 diminished familiarity with gods and genii they very easily 
 and naturally deduce two conclusions: 1st, That men are 
 degenerated, and 2nd, That they are less in favor with the 
 gods. The people of the petty states and colonies, which 
 
 10 have now acquired stability and form, which owed their origin 
 and first prosperity to the talents and courage of a single 
 chief, magnify their founder through the mists of distance 
 and tradition, and perceive him achieving wonders with a 
 god or goddess always at his elbow. They find his name 
 
 is and his exploits thus magnified and accompanied in their 
 traditionary songs, which are their only memorials. All that 
 is said of him is in this character. There is nothing to con- 
 tradict it. The man and his exploits and his tutelary deities 
 are mixed and blended in one invariable association. The 
 
 20 marvelous, too, is very much like a snowball : it grows as it 
 
 rolls downward, till the little nucleus of truth, which began 
 
 its descent from the summit, is hidden in the accumulation 
 
 of superinduced hyperbole. 
 
 When tradition, thus adorned and exaggerated, has sur- 
 
 25 rounded the founders of families and states with so much 
 adventitious power and magnificence, there is no praise 
 which a living poet can, without fear of being kicked for 
 clumsy flattery, address to a living chief, that will not still 
 leave the impression that the latter is not so great a man as 
 
 3 his ancestors. The man must, in this case, be praised 
 through his ancestors. Their greatness must be established, 
 and he must be shown to be their worthy descendant. All 
 the people of a state are interested in the founder of their 
 state. All states that have harmonized into a common form 
 
 35 of society are interested in their respective founders. AH 
 men are interested in their ancestors. All men love to look 
 back into the days that are past. In these circumstances 
 traditional national poetry is reconstructed, and brought, like 
 chaos, into order and form. The interest is more universal ;
 
 THE FOUR AGES OF POETRY. 51 
 
 understanding is enlarged : passion still has scope and play ; 
 character is still various and strong; nature is still unsub- 
 dued and existing in all her beauty and magnificence, and 
 men are not yet excluded from her observation by the mag- 
 nitude of cities, or the daily confinement of civic life ; poetry s 
 is more an art ; it requires greater skill in numbers, greater 
 command of language, more extensive and various knowledge, 
 and greater comprehensiveness of mind. It still exists with- 
 out rivals in any other department of literature ; and even 
 the arts, painting and sculpture certainly, and music probably, ' 
 are comparatively rude and imperfect. The whole field of 
 intellect is its own. It has no rivals in history, nor in phil- 
 osophy, nor in science. It is cultivated by the greatest intel- 
 lects of the age, and listened to by all the rest. This is the 
 age of Homer, the golden age of poetry. Poetry has now is 
 attained its perfection ; it has attained the point which it can- 
 not pass ; genius therefore seeks new forms for the treatment 
 of the same subjects ; hence the lyric poetry of Pindar and 
 Alcaeus, and the tragic poetry of .^schylus and Sophocles. 
 The favor of kings, the honor of the Olympic crown, the 20 
 applause of present multitudes, all that can feed vanity and 
 stimulate rivalry, await the successful cultivator of this art, 
 till its forms become exhausted, and new rivals arise around 
 it in new fields of literature, which gradually acquire more 
 influence as, with the progress of reason and civilization, 25 
 facts become more interesting than fiction ; indeed, the 
 maturity of poetry may be considered the infancy of history. 
 The transition from Homer to Herodotus is scarcely more 
 remarkable than that from Herodotus to Thucydides, in the 
 gradual dereliction of fabulous incident and ornamented Ian- 3 
 guage. Herodotus is as much a poet in relation to Thucy- 
 dides as Homer is in relation to Herodotus. The history of 
 Herodotus is half a poem ; it was written while the whole 
 field of literature yet belonged to the Muses, and the nine 
 books of which it was composed were therefore of right, as 35 
 well as of courtesy, superinscribed with their nine names. 
 
 Speculations, too, and disputes, on the nature of man and 
 of mind, on moral duties and on good and evil, on the ani- 
 mate and inanimate components of the visible world, begin to
 
 52 THE FOUR AGES OF POETRY. 
 
 share attention with the eggs of Leda and the horns of lo, 
 and to draw off from poetry a portion of its once undivided 
 audience. 
 
 Then comes the silver age, or the poetry of civilized life. 
 s This poetry is of two kinds, imitative and original. The 
 imitative consists in recasting, and giving an exquisite polish 
 to, the poetry of the age of gold ; of this Virgil is the most 
 obvious and striking example. The original is chiefly comic, 
 didactic, or satiric, as in Menander, Aristophanes, Horace, 
 
 1 and Juvenal. The poetry of this age is characterized by an 
 exquisite and fastidious selection of words, and a labor-d and 
 somewhat monotonous harmony of expression ; but its mo- 
 notony consists in this, that experience having exhausted all 
 the varieties of modulation, the civilized poetry selects the 
 
 J s most beautiful, and prefers the repetition of these to ranging 
 through the variety of all. But the best expression being 
 that into which the idea naturally falls, it requires the utmost 
 labor and care so to reconcile the inflexibility of civilized 
 language and the labored polish of versification with the idea 
 
 20 intended to be expressed, that sense may not appear to be 
 sacrificed to sound. Hence numerous efforts and rare success. 
 This state of poetry is, however, a step towards its extinc- 
 tion. Feeling and passion are best painted in, and roused 
 by, ornamental and figurative language ; but the reason and 
 
 2 5 the understanding are best addressed in the simplest and 
 most unvarnished phrase. Pure reason and dispassionate 
 truth would be perfectly ridiculous in verse, as we may judge 
 by versifying one of Euclid's demonstrations. This will be 
 found true of all dispassionate reasoning whatever, and of 
 
 3 all reasoning that requires comprehensive views and enlarged 
 combinations. It is only the more tangible points of moral- 
 ity, those which command assent at once, those which have 
 a mirror in every mind, and in which the severity of reason 
 is warmed and rendered palatable by being mixed up with 
 
 35 feeling and imagination, that are applicable even to what 
 is called moral poetry; and as the sciences of morals and 
 of mind advance towards perfection, as they become more 
 enlarged and comprehensive in their views, as reason gains 
 the ascendancy in them over imagination and feeling, poetry
 
 THE FOUR AGES OF POETRY. 53 
 
 can no longer accompany them in their progress, but drops 
 into the background, and leaves them to advance alone. 
 
 Thus the empire of thought is withdrawn from poetry, as 
 the empire of facts had been before. In respect of the latter, 
 the poet of the age of iron celebrates the achievements of s 
 his contemporaries ; the poet of the age of gold celebrates 
 the heroes of the age of iron ; the poet of the age of silver 
 recasts the poems of the age of gold ; we may here see how 
 very slight a ray of historical truth is sufficient to dissipate 
 all the illusions of poetry. We know no more of the men i 
 than of the gods of the Iliad, no more of Achilles than v/e do 
 of Thetis, no more of Hector and Andromache than we do of 
 Vulcan and Venus ; these belong altogether to poetry ; history 
 has no share in them ; but Virgil knew better than to write 
 an epic about Caesar ; he left him to Livy, and traveled out s 
 of the confines of truth and history into the regions of poetry 
 and fiction. 
 
 Good sense and elegant learning, conveyed in polished and 
 somewhat monotonous verse, are the perfection of the original 
 and imitative poetry of civilized life. Its range is limited, 20 
 and when exhausted, nothing remains but the cranibe repetita 
 [stale repetition] of commonplace, which at length becomes 
 thoroughly wearisome, even to the most indefatigable readers 
 of the newest new nothings. 
 
 It is now evident that poetry must either cease to be culti- 25 
 vated, or strike into a new path. The poets of the age of 
 gold have been imitated and repeated till no new imitation 
 will attract notice ; the limited range of ethical and didactic 
 poetry is exhausted ; the associations of daily life in an ad- 
 vanced state of society are of very dry, methodical, unpoetical 3 
 matters-of-fact ; but there is always a multitude of listless 
 idlers, yawning for amusement, and gaping for novelty ; and 
 the poet makes it his glory to be foremost among their 
 purveyors. 
 
 Then comes the age of brass, which, by rejecting the polish 35 
 and the learning of the age of silver, and taking a retrograde 
 stride to the barbarisms and crude traditions of the age of 
 iron, professes to return to nature and revive the age of gold. 
 This is the second childhood of poetry. To the comprehen-
 
 54 THE FOUR AGES OF POETRY. 
 
 sive energy of the Homeric Muse, which, by giving at once 
 the grand outline of things, presented to the mind a vivid 
 picture in one or two verses, inimitable alike in simplicity and 
 magnificence, is substituted a verbose and minutely-detailed 
 s description of thoughts, passions, actions, persons, and 
 things, in that loose, rambling style of verse, which any one 
 may write stans pede in uno [standing on one foot], at the 
 rate of two hundred lines in an hour. To this age may be 
 referred all the poets who flourished in the decline of the 
 
 10 Roman Empire. The best specimen of it, though not the 
 most generally known, is the Dionysiaca of Nonnus, which 
 contains many passages of exceeding beauty in the midst of 
 masses of amplification and repetition. 
 
 The iron age of classical poetry may be called the bardic ; 
 
 15 the golden, the Homeric : the silver, the Virgilian ; and the 
 brass, the Nonnic. 
 
 Modern poetry has also its four ages; but "it wears its 
 rue with a difference." 
 
 To the age of brass in the ancient world succeeded the 
 
 2j Dark Ages, in which the light of the Gospel began to spread 
 over Europe, and in which, by a mysterious and inscrutable 
 dispensation, the darkness thickened with the progress of the 
 light. The tribes that overran the Roman Empire brought 
 back the days ef barbarism, but with this difference, that 
 
 2 s there were many books in the world, many places in whiten 
 they were preserved, and occasionally some one by whom 
 they were read, who indeed (if he escaped being burned, pour 
 V amour de Dieu [for the love of God]) generally lived an 
 object of mysterious fear, with the reputation of magician, 
 
 3 alchemist, and astrologer. The emerging of the nations of 
 Europe from this superinduced barbarism, and their settling 
 into new forms of polity, was accompanied, as the first ages 
 of Greece had been, with a wild spirit of adventure, which, 
 co-operating with new manners and new superstitions, raised 
 
 35 up a fresh crop of chimeras, not less fruitful, though far less 
 beautiful, than those of Greece. The semi-deification of 
 women by the maxims of the age of chivalry, combining with 
 these new fables, produced the romance of the Middle Ages. 
 The founders of the new line of heroes took the place of the
 
 THE FOUR AGES OF POETRY. 55 
 
 demigods of Grecian poetry. Charlemagne and his Paladins, 
 Arthur and his Knights of the Round Table, the heroes of the 
 iron age of chivalrous poetry, were seen through the same 
 magnifying mist of distance, and their exploits were celebrated 
 with even more extravagant hyperbole. These legends, com- s 
 bined with the exaggerated love that pervades the songs of 
 the troubadours, the reputation of magic that attached to 
 learned men, the infant wonders of natural philosophy, the 
 crazy fanaticism of the Crusades, the power and privileges of 
 the great feudal chiefs, and the holy mysteries of monks and I0 
 nuns, formed a state of society in which no two laymen could 
 meet without fighting, and in which the three staple ingredi- 
 ents of lover, prize-fighter, and fanatic, that composed the 
 basis of the character of every true man, were mixed up and 
 diversified, in different individuals and classes, with so many 15 
 distinctive excellences, and under such an infinite motley 
 variety of costume, as gave the range of a most extensive and 
 picturesque field to the two great constituents of poetry, love 
 and battle. 
 
 From these ingredients of the iron age of modern poetry, 20 
 dispersed in the rimes of minstrels and the songs of the trou- 
 badours, arose the golden age, in which the scattered materials 
 were harmonized and blended about the time of the revival of 
 learning ; but with this peculiar difference, that Greek and 
 Roman literature pervaded all the poetry of the golden age of 25 
 modern poetry, and hence resulted a heterogeneous compound 
 of all ages and nations in one picture ; an infinite license, 
 which gave to the poet the free range of the whole field of 
 imagination and memory. This was carried very far by Ariosto, 
 but farthest of all by Shakespeare and his contemporaries, 30 
 who used time and locality merely because they could not do 
 without them, because every action must have its when and 
 where ; but they made no scruple of deposing a Roman Em- 
 peror by an Italian Count, and sending him off in the disguise 
 of a French pilgrim to be shot with a blunderbuss by an 35 
 English archer. This makes the old English drama very pic- 
 turesque, at any rate, in the variety of costume, and very diver- 
 sified in action and character, though it is a picture of nothing 
 that ever was seen on earth except a Venetian carnival.
 
 56 THE FOUR AGES OF POETRY. 
 
 The greatest of English poets, Milton, may be said to stand 
 alone between the ages of gold and silver, combining the ex- 
 cellences of both ; for with all the energy, and power, and 
 freshness of the first, he united all the studied and elaborate 
 P magnificence of the second. 
 
 The silver age succeeded, beginning with Dryden, coming 
 to perfection with Pope, and ending with Goldsmith, Collins, 
 and Gray. 
 
 Cowper divested verse of its exquisite polish ; he thought in 
 
 10 metre, but paid more attention to his thoughts than his verse. 
 It would be difficult to draw the boundary of prose and blank 
 verse between his letters and his poetry. 
 
 The silver age was the reign of authority ; but authority 
 now began to be shaken, not only in poetry but in the whole 
 
 15 sphere of its dominion. The contemporaries of Gray and 
 Cowper were deep and elaborate thinkers. The subtle scep- 
 ticism of Hume, the solemn irony of Gibbon, the daring para- 
 doxes of Rousseau, and the biting ridicule of Voltaire, directed 
 the energies of four extraordinary minds to shake every por- 
 
 20 tion of the reign of authority. Inquiry was roused, the activity 
 of intellect was excited, and poetry came in for its share of 
 the general result. The changes had been rung on lovely 
 maid and sylvan shade, summer heat and green retreat, wav- 
 ing trees and sighing breeze, gentle swains and amorous 
 
 25 pains, by versifiers who took them on trust as meaning some- 
 thing very soft and tender, without much caring what ; but 
 with this general activity of intellect came a necessity for even 
 poets to appear to know something of what they professed 
 to talk of. Thomson and Cowper looked at the trees and hills 
 
 30 which so many ingenious gentlemen had rimed about so long 
 without looking at them at all, and the effect of the operation 
 on poetry was like the discovery of a new world. Painting 
 shared the influence, and the principles of picturesque beauty 
 were explored by adventurous essayists with indefatigable per- 
 
 35 tinacity. The success which attended these experiments, and 
 the pleasure which resulted from them, had the usual effect of 
 all new enthusiasms, that of turning the heads of a few unfor- 
 tunate persons, the patriarchs of the age of brass, who, mis- 
 taking the prominent novelty for the all-important totality,
 
 THE FOUR AGES OF POETRY. 57 
 
 seem to have ratiocinated much in the following manner : 
 " Poetical genius is the finest of all things, and we feel that 
 we have more of it than any one ever had. The way to bring 
 it to perfection is to cultivate poetical impressions exclusively. 
 Poetical impressions can be received only among natural 5 
 scenes, for all that is artificial is anti-poetical. Society is arti- 
 ficial, therefore we will live out of society. The mountains are 
 natural, therefore we will live in the mountains. There we 
 shall be shining models of purity and virtue, passing the whole 
 day in the innocent and amiable occupation of going up and 10 
 down hill, receiving poetical impressions, and communica- 
 ting them in immortal verse to admiring generations." To 
 some such perversion of intellect we owe that egregious 
 confraternity of rimesters, known by the name of the Lake 
 Poets ; who certainly did receive and communicate to the '5 
 world some of the most extraordinary poetical impressions 
 that ever were heard of, and ripened into models of public 
 virtue, too splendid to need illustration. They wrote verses 
 on a new principle ; saw rocks and rivers in a new light ; and 
 remaining studiously ignorant of history, society, and human 2 
 nature, cultivated the fantasy only at the expense of the 
 memory and the reason ; and contrived, though they had 
 retreated from the world for the express purpose of seeing 
 nature as she was, to see her only as she was not, converting 
 the land they lived in into a sort of fairyland, which they 2 S 
 peopled with mysticisms and chimeras. This gave what is 
 called a new tone to poetry, and conjured up a herd of desper- 
 ate imitators, who have brought the age of brass prematurely 
 to its dotage. 
 
 The descriptive poetry of the present day has been called 3 
 by its cultivators a return to nature. Nothing is more im- 
 pertinent than this pretension. Poetry cannot travel out of 
 the regions of its birth, the uncultivated lands of semi-civilized 
 men. Mr. Wordsworth, the great leader of the returners to 
 nature, cannot describe a scene under his own eyes without 35 
 putting into it the shadow of a Danish boy or the living 
 ghost of Lucy Gray, or some similar fantastical parturition of 
 the moods of his own mind. 
 
 In the origin and perfection of poetry, all the associations
 
 58 THE FOUR AGES OF POETRY. 
 
 of life were composed of poetical materials. With us it is 
 decidedly the reverse. We know, too, that there are no 
 Dryads in Hyde Park, nor Naiads in the Regent's Canal. But 
 barbaric manners and supernatural interventions are essential 
 5 to poetry. Either in the scene, or in the time, or in both, it 
 must be remote from our ordinary perceptions. While the 
 historian and the philosopher are advancing in, and acceler- 
 ating, the progress of knowledge, the poet is wallowing in the 
 rubbish of departed ignorance, and raking up the ashes of 
 
 10 dead savages to find gewgaws and rattles for the grown 
 babies of the age. Mr. Scott digs up the poachers and cattle- 
 stealers of the ancient border. Lord Byron cruises for thieves 
 and pirates on the shores of the Morea and among the Greek 
 islands. Mr. Southey wades through ponderous volumes of 
 
 15 travels and old chronicles, from which he carefully selects all 
 that is false, useless, and absurd, as being essentially poetical ; 
 and when he has a commonplace book full of monstrosities, 
 strings them into an epic. Mr. Wordsworth picks up village 
 legends from old women and sextons ; and Mr. Coleridge, to 
 
 20 the valuable information acquired from similar sources, super- 
 adds the dreams of crazy theologians and the mysticisms of 
 German metaphysics, and favors the world with visions in 
 verse, in which the quadruple elements of sexton, old woman, 
 Jeremy Taylor, and Immanuel Kant are harmonized into a 
 
 2 5 delicious poetical compound. Mr. Moore presents us with 
 a Persian, and Mr. Campbell with a Pennsylvanian tale, both 
 formed on the same principle as Mr. Southey's epics, by 
 extracting from a perfunctory and desultory perusal of a 
 collection of voyages and travels, all that useful investigation 
 
 3 would not seek for and that common sense would reject. 
 
 These disjointed relics of tradition and fragments of second- 
 hand observation, being woven into a tissue of verse, con- 
 structed on what Mr. Coleridge calls a new principle (that is, 
 no principle at all), compose a modern-antique compound of 
 
 35 frippery and barbarism, in which the puling sentimentality 
 of the present time is grafted on the misrepresented rugged- 
 ness of the past into a heterogeneous congeries of unamalga- 
 mating manners, sufficient to impose on the common readers 
 of poetry, over whose understandings the poet of this class
 
 THE FOUR AGES OF POETRY. 59 
 
 possesses that commanding advantage which, in all circum- 
 stances and conditions of life, a man who knows something, 
 however little, always possesses over one who knows nothing. 
 A poet in our times is a semi-barbarian in a civilized com- 
 munity. He lives in the days that are past. His ideas, 5 
 thoughts, feelings, associations, are all with barbarous man- 
 ners, obsolete customs, and exploded superstitions. The 
 march of his intellect is like that of a crab, backward. The 
 brighter the light diffused around him by the progress of 
 reason, the thicker is the darkness of antiquated barbarism ' 
 in which he buries himself like a mole, to throw up the barren 
 hillocks of his Cimmerian labors. The philosophic mental 
 tranquillity which looks round with an equal eye on all external 
 things, collects a store of ideas, discriminates their relative 
 value, assigns to all their proper place, and from the materials 15 
 of useful knowledge thus collected, appreciated, and arranged, 
 forms new combinations that impress the stamp of their 
 power and utility on the real business of life, is diametrically 
 the reverse of that frame of mind which poetry inspires, or 
 from which poetry can emanate. The highest inspirations 2 
 of poetry are resolvable into three ingredients : the rant of 
 unregulated passion, the whining of exaggerated feeling, and 
 the cant of factitious sentiment ; and can therefore serve only 
 to ripen a splendid lunatic like Alexander, a puling driveler 
 like Werter, or a morbid dreamer like Wordsworth. It can 2 s 
 never make a philosopher, nor a statesman, nor in any class 
 of life a useful or rational man. It cannot claim the slightest 
 share in any one of the comforts and utilities of life, of 
 which we have witnessed so many and so rapid advances. 
 But though not useful, it may be said it is highly ornamental, 3 
 and deserves to be cultivated for the pleasure it yields. 
 Even if this be granted, it does not follow that a writer of 
 poetry in the present state of society is not a waster of his 
 own time, and a robber of that of others. Poetry is not one 
 of those arts which, like painting, require repetition and 35 
 multiplication, in order to be diffused among society. There 
 are more good poems already existing than are sufficient to 
 employ that portion of life which any mere reader and recipi- 
 ent of poetical impressions should devote to them, and these,
 
 60 THE FOUR AGES OF POETRY. 
 
 having been produced in poetical times, are far superior in all 
 the characteristics of poetry to the artificial reconstructions of 
 a few morbid ascetics in unpoetical times. To read the pro- 
 miscuous rubbish of the present time, to the exclusion of the 
 
 5 select treasures of the past, is to substitute the worse for the 
 better variety of the same mode of enjoyment. 
 
 But in whatever degree poetry is cultivated, it must neces- 
 sarily be to the neglect of some branch of useful study ; and it 
 is a lamentable spectacle to see minds capable of better things 
 
 10 running to seed in the specious indolence of these empty, 
 aimless mockeries of intellectual exertion. Poetry was the 
 mental rattle that awakened the attention of intellect in the 
 infancy of civil society ; but for the maturity of mind to make 
 a serious business of the playthings of its childhood, is as 
 
 15 absurd as for a full-grown man to rub his gums with coral, 
 
 and cry to be charmed to sleep by the jingle of silver bells. 
 
 As to that small portion of our contemporary poetry which 
 
 is neither descriptive, nor narrative, nor dramatic, and which, 
 
 for want of a better name, may be called ethical, the most 
 
 20 distinguished portion of it, consisting merely of querulous, 
 egotistical rhapsodies, to express the writer's high dissatisfac- 
 tion with the world and everything in it, serves only to con- 
 firm what has been said of the semi-barbarous character of 
 poets, who from singing dithyrambics and " lo Triumphe," 
 
 25 while society was savage, grow rabid, and out of their ele- 
 ment, as it becomes polished and enlightened. 
 
 Now when we consider that it is not to the thinking and 
 studious, and scientific and philosophical part of the com- 
 munity, not to those whose minds are bent on the pursuit 
 
 3 and promotion of permanently useful ends and aims, that 
 poets must address their minstrelsy, but to that much larger 
 portion of the reading public whose minds are not awakened 
 to the desire of valuable knowledge, and who are indifferent 
 to anything beyond being charmed, moved, excited, affected, 
 
 35 and exalted, charmed by harmony, moved by sentiment, 
 excited by passion, affected by pathos, and exalted by sublim- 
 ity, harmony, which is language on the rack of Procrustes ; 
 
 . sentiment, which is canting egotism in the mask of refined 
 feeling ; passion, which is the commotion of a weak and selfish
 
 THE FOUR AGES OF POETRY. 61 
 
 mind; pathos, which is the whining of an unmanly spirit; 
 and sublimity, which is the inflation of an empty head ; when 
 we consider that the great and permanent interests of human 
 society become more and more the mainspring of intellectual 
 pursuit ; that, in proportion as they become so, the subordi- 5 
 nacy of the ornamental to the useful will be more and more 
 seen and acknowledged, and that therefore the progress of use- 
 ful art and science, and of moral and political knowledge, will 
 continue more and more to withdraw attention from frivolous 
 and unconducive to solid and conducive studies ; that there- 10 
 fore the poetical audience will not only continually diminish 
 in the proportion of its number to that of the rest of the read- 
 ing public, but will also sink lower and lower in the compari- 
 son of intellectual acquirement; when we consider that the 
 poet must still please his audience, and must therefore con- 15 
 tinue to sink to their level, while the rest of the community 
 is rising above it ; we may easily conceive that the day is 
 not distant when the degraded state of every species of poetry 
 will be as generally recognized as that of dramatic poetry has 
 long been ; and this not from any decrease either of intel- 20 
 lectual power or intellectual acquisition, but because intel- 
 lectual power and intellectual acquisition have turned them- 
 selves into other and better channels, and have abandoned 
 the cultivation and the fate of poetry to the degenerate fry of 
 modern rimesters, and their Olympic judges, the magazine 25 
 critics, who continue to debate and promulgate oracles about 
 poetry as if it were still what it was in the Homeric age, the 
 all-in-all of intellectual progression, and as if there were no 
 such things in existence as mathematicians, astronomers, 
 chemists, moralists, metaphysicians, historians, politicians, 30 
 and political economists, who have built into the upper air of 
 intelligence a pyramid, from the summit of which they see 
 the modern Parnassus far beneath them, and, knowing how 
 small a place it occupies in the comprehensiveness of their 
 prospect, smile at the little ambition and the circumscribed 35 
 perceptions with which the drivelers and mountebanks upon 
 it are contending for the poetical palm and the critical chair.
 
 NOTES. 
 
 1 1. After the title I have omitted the sub-title, " Part I." See 
 notes on 45 6 and 45 21. 
 
 1 10. The one is the TO iroitiv. Cf. Sidney, Defense 6 30. 
 
 1 13. The TO \oyieti>. Shelley inadvertently substitutes an active 
 for the proper deponent form. 
 
 1 24. Shadow to the substance. Cf. 24 14. 
 
 3 13-15. The future . . . the seed. Cf. 6 G-8 : " He beholds the future 
 in the present, and his thoughts are the germs of the flower and fruit 
 of latest time." And see 38 19-25. 
 
 4 28. Unapprehended. Cf. 11 21, 13 26, 46 25. 
 
 5 4-6. The same footsteps, etc. De Augment. Scient. cap. I, lib. iii. 
 (Shelley's note). Cf. Adv. Learning!. 5. 3. 
 
 5 20-29. But poets . . . religion. Cf. Shelley, Discourse on the 
 Manners of the Ancients : " For all the inventive arts maintain, as it 
 were, a sympathetic connection between each other, being no more 
 than various expressions of one internal power, modified by different 
 circumstances, either of an individual or of society." 
 
 6 1. Prophets. Cf. Sidney, Defense 5 12-16. 
 
 6 1415. A poet participates in the eternal, the infinite, and the one. 
 Cf. the discussion in my edition of Sidney's Defense of Poesy, Introduc- 
 tion, p. xxix ff. 
 
 6 31-7 2. But poetry, etc. Cf. Plato, Symposium 205 (Shelley's 
 trans.) : " . . . Poetry, which is a general name signifying every cause 
 whereby anything proceeds from that which is not into that which is; 
 so that the exercise of every inventive art is poetry, and all such artists 
 poets. Yet they are not called poets, but distinguished by other names; 
 and one portion or species of poetry, that which has relation to music 
 and rhythm, is divided from all others, and known by the name belong- 
 ing to all." 
 
 7 14. Mirror. Shelley is partial to this figure. Cf. 10 30-32, 18 1C, 
 19 6 ff., 24 11, 46 2C. 
 
 8 13-18. Hence the language, etc. Cf. Sidney, Defense 5 33-34, 
 11 25-31, 33 19-24.
 
 64 NOTES. 
 
 8 19. Hence the beauty of translation. But cf. Goethe, Dichtung 
 und Wahrheit, Th. 3, B. n, quoted in Hayward, Statesmen and 
 Writers 2. 307 : " I honor both rhythm and rime, by which poetry 
 first becomes poetry; but the properly deep and radically operative 
 the truly developing and quickening, is that which remains of the poet 
 when he is translated into prose. The inward substance then remains 
 in its purity and fulness; which, when it is absent, a dazzling exterior 
 often deludes with the semblance of, and, when it is present, conceals." 
 
 8 30 ff. Yet it is, etc. Cf. Bagehot, Literary Studies 2. 351: " But 
 the exact line which separates grave novels in verse, like Aylmer's 
 Field or Enoch Arden, from grave novels not in verse, like Silas Mar- 
 ner or Adam Bede, we own we cannot draw with any confidence. Nor, 
 perhaps, is it very important; whether a narrative is thrown into verse 
 or not certainly depends in part on the taste of the age, and in part on 
 its mechanical helps. Verse is the only mechanical help to the mem- 
 ory in rude times, and there is little writing till a cheap something is 
 found to write upon, and a cheap something to write with. . . . We 
 need only say here that poetry, because it has a more marked rhythm 
 than prose, must be more intense in meaning and more concise in style 
 than prose." And see also Hazlitt, Lectures on the English Poets : 
 " I will mention three works which come as near to poetry as possible 
 without absolutely being so; namely, the Pilgrim 's Progress, Robinson 
 Crusoe, and the Tales of Boccaccio. Chaucer and Dryden have trans- 
 lated some of the last into English rime, but the essence and the 
 power of poetry was there before. That which lifts the spirit above the 
 earth, which draws the soul out of itself with indescribable longings, is 
 poetry in kind, and generally fit to become so in name, by being ' mar- 
 ried to immortal verse.' If it is of the essence of poetry to strike and 
 fix the imagination, whether we will or no, to make the eye of child- 
 hood glisten with the starting tear, to be never thought of afterwards 
 with indifference, John Bunyan and Daniel Defoe may be permitted to 
 pass for poets in their way." To these add Sidney, Defense of Poesy 
 11 18-22: "Which I speak to show that it is not riming and versing 
 that maketh a poet no more than a long gown maketh an advocate, 
 who, though he pleaded in armor, should be an advocate and no 
 soldier." 
 
 9 8-19. Plato was essentially a poet, etc. To the same effect in Shel- 
 ley's Preface to his translation of Plato's Symposium : " Plato exhibits 
 the rare union of close and subtle logic with the Pythian enthusiasm of 
 poetry, melted by the splendor and harmony of his periods into one 
 irresistible stream of musical impressions, which hurry the persuasions
 
 NO TES. 65 
 
 onward as in a breathless career. His language is that of an immortal 
 spirit rather than a man. Lord Bacon is, perhaps, the only writer 
 who in these particulars can be compared with him; his imitator Cicero 
 sinks in the comparison into an ape mocking the gestures of a man." 
 Cf. also Sidney, Defense 3 27, note. 
 
 9 20. Lord Bacon was a poet. See the Filum Labyrinthi, and the 
 Essay on Death particularly (Shelley's note). 
 
 10 9 ff. There is this difference, etc. Cf. Aristotle, Poetics 9 1-3 : 
 " The real distinction between the poet and the historian is not found 
 in the employment of verse by the former, and of prose by the latter, 
 for, if we suppose the history of Herodotus to be versified, it would be 
 nothing but history still, only now in a metrical form. The true ground 
 of difference is that the historian relates what has taken place, the poet 
 how certain things might have taken place. Hence poetry is of a more 
 philosophical and serious character than history; it is, we might say, 
 more universal and more ideal. Poetry deals with the general, history 
 with the particular. Now the general shows how certain typical char- 
 acters will speak and act, according to the law of probability or of 
 necessity, as poetry indicates by bestowing certain names upon these 
 characters, but the particular merely relates what Alcibiades, a historic 
 individual, actually did or suffered." And see Sidney, Defense 18 25 ff. 
 
 10 27-29. Hence epitomes, etc. Cf. Bacon, Adv. Learning 2. 2. 4 r 
 " As for the corruptions and moths of history, which are epitomes, the 
 use of them deserveth to be banished, as all men of sound judgment 
 have confessed, as those that have fretted and corroded the sound 
 bodies of many excellent histories, and wrought them into base and 
 unprofitable dregs." 
 
 11 4-5. A single word even may be a spark of inextinguishable 
 thought. Cf. 32 33-34 2 : " Each is as a spark, a burning atom of 
 inextinguishable thought." 
 
 115-12. And thus . . . images. Cf. Sidney, Defense 4 5-15. 
 11 11. Interstices. Cf. 14 17, 39 28 ff.; also 41 13. 
 
 11 10-18. Poetry is . . . -with its delight. Cf. Sidney, Defense 23 13- 
 25 2, 29 19-20. 
 
 12 3-7. The poems of Homer, etc. Cf. Sidney, Defense 2 27 ff. 
 
 12 7-8. Homer embodied, etc. Cf. Gladstone, Gleanings 2. 148 : 
 " Lofty example in comprehensive form is, without doubt, one of the 
 great standing needs of our race. To this want it has been from the 
 first one main purpose of the highest poetry to answer. The quest of 
 Beauty leads all those who engage in it to the ideal or normal man, as 
 the summit of attainable excellence. . . . The concern of Poetry with
 
 66 NOTES. 
 
 corporal beauty is, though important, yet secondary : this art uses 
 form as an auxiliary, as a subordinate though proper part in the delin- 
 eation of mind and character, of which it is appointed to be a visible 
 organ. But with mind and character themselves lies the highest occu- 
 pation of the Muse." 
 
 12 11. Achilles, Hector, and Ulysses. See Sidney, Defense 16 34- 
 172: " See whether wisdom and temperance in Ulysses and Diomedes, 
 valor in Achilles, friendship in Nisus and Euryalus, even to an ignorant 
 man carry not an apparent shining." 
 
 13 13-14. To temper, etc. Cf. Sidney, Defense 58 3-5 : " But if ... 
 you be born so near the dull-making cataract of Nilus, that you can- 
 not hear the planet-like music of poetry." 
 
 13 23-24. But poetry acts in another and diviner manner. Cf. 
 Jowett's words accompanying his translation of Plato, 2. 312-3 (2d 
 edition) : " In modern times we almost ridicule the idea of poetry 
 admitting of a moral. The poet and the prophet, or preacher, in 
 primitive antiquity are one and the same; but in later ages they seem 
 to fall apart. The great art of novel writing, that peculiar creation of 
 our own and the last century, which, together with the sister art of 
 review writing, threatens to absorb all literature, has even less of seri- 
 ousness in her composition. Do we not often hear the novel writer 
 censured for attempting to convey a lesson to the minds of his readers? 
 
 " Yet the true office of a poet or writer of fiction is not merely to 
 give amusement, or to be the expression of the feelings of mankind, 
 good or bad, or even to increase our knowledge of human nature. 
 There have been poets in modern times, such as Goethe or Words- 
 worth, who have not forgotten their high vocation of teachers; and 
 the two greatest of the Greek dramatists owe their sublimity to their 
 ethical character. The noblest truths, sung of in the purest and sweet- 
 est language, are still the proper material of poetry. The poet clothes 
 them with beauty, and has a power of making them enter into the 
 hearts and memories of men. He has not only to speak of themes 
 above the level of ordinary life, but to speak of them in a deeper and 
 tenderer way than they are ordinarily felt, so as to awaken the feeling of 
 them in others. The old he makes young again; the familiar principle 
 he invests with a new dignity; he finds a noble expression for the 
 commonplaces of morality and politics. He uses the things of sense 
 so as to indicate what is beyond; he raises us through earth to heaven. 
 He expresses what the better part of us would fain say, and the half- 
 conscious feeling is strengthened by the expression. He is his own 
 critic, for the spirit of poetry and of criticism are not divided in him.
 
 NOTES. 67 
 
 His mission is not to disguise men from themselves, but to reveal to 
 them their own nature, and make them better acquainted with the 
 world around them. True poetry is the remembrance of youth, of 
 love, the embodiment in words of the happiest and holiest moments of 
 life, of the noblest thoughts of man, of the greatest deeds of the past. 
 The poet of the future may return to his greater calling of the prophet 
 or teacher; indeed, we hardly know what may not be effected for the 
 human race by a better use of the poetical and imaginative faculty. 
 The reconciliation of poetry, as of religion, with truth, may still be 
 possible. Neither is the element of pleasure to be excluded. For 
 when we substitute a higher pleasure for a lower we raise men in the 
 scale of existence. Might not the novelist, too, make an ideal, or 
 rather many ideals of social life, better than a thousand sermons? 
 Plato, like the Puritans, is too much afraid of poetic and artistic influ- 
 ences, though he is not without a true sense of the noble purposes to 
 which art may be applied. 
 
 " Modern poetry is often a sort of plaything, or, in Plato's language, 
 a flattery, a sophistry, or sham, in which, without any serious purpose, 
 the poet lends wings to his fancy and exhibits his gifts of language and 
 metre. Such an one seeks to gratify the taste of his readers; he has 
 the ' savoir faire,' or trick of writing, but he has not the higher spirit 
 of poetry. He has no conception that true art should bring order out 
 of disorder; that it should make provision for the soul's highest inter- 
 est; that it should be pursued only with a view to 'the improvement 
 of the citizens.' He ministers to the weaker side of human nature; he 
 sings the strain of love in the latest fashion; instead of raising men 
 above themselves he brings them back to the 'tyranny of the many 
 masters,' from which all his life long a good man has been praying to 
 be delivered. And often, forgetful of measure and order, he will ex- 
 press not that which is truest, but that which is strongest. Instead of 
 a great and nobly-executed subject, perfect in every part, some fancy 
 of a heated brain is worked out with the strangest incongruity. He is 
 not the master of his words, but his words perhaps borrowed from 
 another the faded reflection of some French or German or Italian 
 writer, have the better of him. Though we are not going to banish 
 the poets, how can we suppose that such utterances have any healing 
 or life-giving influence on the minds of men? 
 
 " ' Let us hear the conclusion of the whole matter ' : Art then must 
 be true, and politics must be true, and the life of man must be true 
 and not a seeming or sham. In all of them order has to be brought 
 out of disorder, truth out of error and falsehood. This is what we
 
 68 NOTES. 
 
 mean by the greatest improvement of man. And so, having considered 
 in what way ' we can best spend the appointed time, we leave the result 
 with God.' " 
 
 13 27. Poetry lifts the veil, etc. The image of concealment and dis- 
 closure is a favorite with Shelley. Cf. 72,9 29, 10 24, 12 13, 25-26, 29 ff., 
 18 17, 19 33, 20 16, 28 22, 30 5-6, 33 6-8, 41 14, 33, 42 1-2, 10-11, 16. 
 
 13 30. And the impersonations, etc. Cf. Sidney, Defense 30 20-25. 
 
 14 12-13. Poetry enlarges, etc. Cf. 9 22-24, 18 20-24; also 17 5. For 
 the image cf. Bacon, Adv. Learning I. I. 3: "Nothing can fill, much 
 less extend, the soul of man, but God and the contemplation of God." 
 
 14 21 ff. A poet therefore would do ill, etc. Cf. Forman, Our Liv- 
 ing Poets, p. 50 : " For a poem wherein the intimate tissues are thus 
 qualified by an ante-natal religiousness, wherein the morality is not an- 
 atomical but cellular, there will always be (to follow up this analogy 
 suggested by the high science of life) critical histologists to lay finger 
 on this and that part, and announce to the untechnical the quality and 
 meaning of the tissue; but such quality and meaning would often be 
 knowledge as new to the poet's self as to the uninstructed audience 
 knowledge indeed as new as the chemistry of honey to the bee. . . . 
 Doubtless the poet's mind would grasp and recognize the codification 
 deduced from his work; but he would deny any intention that such 
 codification should ever have been deduced his proper role lying 
 outside and around the considerations set forth by the critic." 
 
 15 20. As. This connective properly refers only to the former of 
 the two preceding clauses. 
 
 16 7. The drama had its birth. For an excellent account of the 
 Greek drama, see Moulton, Ancient Classical Drama (Macmillan, 
 1890). 
 
 16 16. Idealisms. Both Shelley and Peacock employ these abstracts 
 in -ism. Cf. 17 28, 32 27, S3 37, 57 26, 58 21. 
 
 16 18. Artists of the most consummate skill. Cf. Shelley, Discourse 
 on the Manners of the Ancients : " For it is worthy of observation that 
 whatever the poets of that age produced is as harmonious and perfect 
 as possible. If a drama, for instance, were the composition of a per- 
 son of inferior talent, it was still homogeneous and free from inequali- 
 ties; it was a whole, consistent with itself. The compositions of great 
 minds bore throughout the sustained stamp of their greatness. In the 
 poetry of succeeding ages the expectations are often exalted on Icarian 
 wings, and fall, too much disappointed to give a memory and a name 
 to the oblivious pool in which they fell." 
 
 17 6-7. But the comedy should be as in King Lear, universal, ideal+
 
 NOTES. 69 
 
 and sublime. This is one of the profoundest sentences in the essay. 
 Cf. the discussion in Sidney's Defense of Poesy 50 9, note. 
 
 17 20. Calderon. Cf. Shelley's letter to Peacock, Sept. 21, 1819 
 (Prose Works 4. 125; Peacock's Works 3. 436) : " I have read about 
 twelve of his plays. Some of them certainly deserve to be ranked 
 among the greatest and most perfect productions of the human mind. 
 He excels all modern dramatists, with the exception of Shakespeare, 
 whom he resembles, however, in the depth of thought and subtlety of 
 imagination of his writings, and in the one rare power of interweaving 
 delicate and powerful comic traits with the most tragic situations, with- 
 out diminishing their interest. I rank him far above Beaumont and 
 Fletcher." Again in a letter to Gisborne, Nov., 1820 (Prose Works 
 4. 193; Peacock's Works 3. 436) : " I am bathing myself in the light 
 and odor of the flowery and starry Autos. I have read them all more 
 than once." 
 
 1725. Observation. ' Observance ' is now appropriated to this spe- 
 cial sense. Cf. 8 26. 
 
 IS 12-15. The drama, etc. Cf. Ruskin, Crown of Wild Olive 
 ( War) : " For it is an assured truth that, whenever the faculties of 
 men are at their fulness, they must express themselves by art; and to 
 say that a state is without such expression is to say that it is sunk from 
 the proper level of manly nature." 
 
 18 28-29. Even crime is disarmed of half its horror and all its con- 
 tagion. Cf. Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France (Payne's 
 ed. of Select Works 2 : 89) : " Under which vice itself lost half its 
 evil, by losing all its grossness." 
 
 19 1-2. Self-knowledge and self-respect. Cf. Tennyson, (Enone : 
 
 Self-reverence, self-knowledge, self-control, 
 These three alone lead life to sovereign power. 
 
 19 4. The drama, etc. This passage, like the well-known Shake- 
 spearean parallel {Hamlet 3. 2. 23-27), may be traced back to a saying 
 attributed by Donatus to Cicero (Cicero, ed. Baiter-Kayser, 8. 228) : 
 " Comoediam esse imitationem vitse, speculum consuetudinis, imaginem 
 veritatis" [Comedy is the semblance of life, the mirror of custom, the 
 image of truth]. 
 
 20 2 ff. Grossest degradation of the drama, etc. Cf. Ward, Hist. 
 Eng. Dram. Lit. 2. 613-4: "This absence of moral purpose is the 
 true cause of the failure of our post- Restoration comic dramatists as a 
 body to satisfy the demands which are to be made upon their art." 
 Also 2. 620: "There are two forces which no dramatic literature can
 
 70 NOTES. 
 
 neglect with impunity the national genius and the laws of morality. 
 . . . Because, to suit the vicious license of their public, the contem- 
 porary comic dramatists bade defiance to the order which they well 
 knew to be necessary for the moral government of human society, 
 their productions have failed to hold an honorable place in our national 
 literature.'' 
 
 20 10. Comedy loses its ideal universality. Cf. the anecdote related 
 by Peacock (Memoirs of Shelley; Works 3. 411), which illustrates 
 Shelley's sensitiveness to the exaggerations and perversions in which 
 comedy sometimes abounds : " He had a prejudice against theatres, 
 which I took some pains to overcome. I induced him one evening 
 to accompany me to a representation of the School for Scandal. 
 When, after the scene which exhibited Charles Surface in his jollity, 
 the scene returned, in the fourth act, to Joseph's library, Shelley said 
 to me : ' I see the purpose of this comedy. It is to associate virtue 
 with bottles and glasses, and villany with books.' I had great difficulty 
 to make him stay to the end. He often talked of the withering and 
 perverting spirit of comedy. I do not think he ever went to another." 
 Another illustration is furnished by Peacock (Works 3. 412) : "When 
 I came to the passage [Michael Perez's soliloquy in Rule a Wife and 
 Have a Wife~\ ... he said, ' There is comedy in its perfection. So- 
 ciety grinds down poor wretches into the dust of abject poverty, till 
 they are scarcely recognizable as human beings; and then, instead of 
 being treated as what they really are, subjects of the deepest pity, they 
 are brought forward as grotesque monstrosities to be laughed at.' I 
 said, ' You must admit the fineness of the expression.' ' It is true,' he 
 answered, ' but the finer it is the worse it is, with such a perversion of 
 sentiment.' " 
 
 21 13. The bucolic writers. Theocritus, Moschus, and Bion. 
 
 22 27. Astraa. Goddess of Justice. Cf. Ovid, Metamorph. I. 150-1 : 
 " Piety lies vanquished, and the virgin Astrsea is the last of the heav- 
 enly deities to abandon the earth, now drenched in slaughter." 
 
 236. Chain. Cf. Plato, Ion 533, 536 (Shelley's trans.): "It is a 
 divine influence which moves you, like that which resides in the stone 
 called magnet by Euripides, and Heraclea by the people. For not 
 only does this stone itself possess the power of attracting iron rings, 
 but it can communicate to them the power of attracting other rings; 
 so that you may see sometimes a long chain of rings, and other iron 
 substances, attached and suspended one to the other by this influence. 
 And as the power of the stone circulates through all the links of this 
 series, and attaches each to each, so the Muse, communicating through
 
 NOTES. 71 
 
 those whom she has first inspired, to all others capable of sharing in 
 the inspiration, the influence of that first enthusiasm, creates a chain 
 and a succession. . . . Know then that the spectator represents the 
 last of the rings which derive a mutual and successive power from the 
 Heracleotic stone of which I spoke. You, the actor or rhapsodist, 
 represent the intermediate one, and the poet that attached to the 
 magnet itself. Through all these the God draws the souls of men 
 according to his pleasure, having attached them to one another by the 
 power transmitted from himself. And as from that stone, so a long 
 chain of poets, theatrical performers and subordinate teachers and 
 professors of the musical art, laterally connected with the main series, 
 are suspended from the Muse itself, as from the origin of the influence. 
 We call this inspiration, and our expression indeed comes near to the 
 truth; for the person who is an agent in this universal and reciprocal 
 attraction is indeed possessed, and some are attracted and suspended 
 by one of the poets who are the first rings in this great chain, and some 
 by another." 
 
 23 20. Episodes. Cf. 25 1. 
 
 25 1. Quia carent vate sacro. " Because they lack the bard divine." 
 The reading of the original is : " Carent quia vate sacro " (Horace, 
 Od. 4. 9. 28). Conington thus translates w. 25-28: 
 
 Before Atrides men were brave, 
 But ah ! oblivion, dark and long, 
 Has locked them in a tearless grave, 
 For lack of consecrating song. 
 
 25 3-4. Inspired rhapsodist. Probably suggested by Plato's Ion. 
 Ion himself, according to the dialogue, is such an inspired rhapsodist. 
 
 25 14. Generals. Shelley may still have been thinking of the Ion. 
 Cf. Ion 540-1 (Shelley's trans.) : 
 
 Ion. I see no difference between a general and a rhapsodist. 
 
 Socrates. How ! no difference ? Are not the arts of generalship and reci- 
 tation two distinct things ? 
 
 Ion. No, they are the same. 
 
 Socrates. Must he who is a good rhapsodist be also necessarily a good 
 general ? 
 
 Ion. Infallibly, O Socrates. 
 
 25 20-21. The poetry of Moses, Job, David, Solomon, and Isaiah. 
 Cf. Sidney, Defense 9 19-24. 
 
 25 29. Three forms. Such a division is found in the Fourth Book 
 of the Republic. Jowett (Plato 3. 57) says on this point: "The psy-
 
 72 NOTES. 
 
 chology of Plato extends no further than the division of the soul into 
 the rational, irascible, and concupiscent elements, which, as far as we 
 know, was first made by him, and has been retained by Aristotle and 
 succeeding ethical writers. The chief difficulty in this early analysis 
 of the mind is to define exactly the place of the irascible faculty, which 
 may be variously described under the terms righteous indignation, 
 spirit, passion." This distribution of faculties is likewise observed in 
 the Tinuzus ; cf. Jowett 3. 582: "The soul of man is divided by him 
 into three parts, answering roughly to the charioteer and steeds of the 
 Phaedrus, and to the \6yos, Oupos, and tiriOufj.ia of the Republic and 
 Nicomachean Ethics. First, there is the immortal part which is seated 
 in the brain, and is alone divine, and akin to the soul of the universe. 
 This alone thinks and knows and is the ruler of the whole. Secondly, 
 there is the higher mortal soul which, though liable to perturbations of 
 her own, takes the side of reason against the lower appetites. The 
 seat of this is the heart, in which courage, anger, and all the nobler 
 affections are supposed to reside. . . . There is also a third or appe- 
 titive soul, which receives the commands of the immortal part, not 
 immediately but mediately, through the higher mortal nature." An- 
 other and fourfold division is found in the Sixth Book {Rep. 511; 
 Jowett 3. 399) : " Let there be four faculties in the soul reason 
 answering to the highest, understanding to the second, faith or per- 
 suasion to the third, and knowledge of shadows to the last." Else- 
 where (Plato 3. 77) Jowett translates the designation of the fourth 
 faculty as " the perception of likenesses." 
 
 26 1-3. And the crow, etc. Shakespeare, Macb. 3. 2. 51-3. 
 
 26 14 Celtic. Here, and wherever in the essay the word ' Celtic ' 
 occurs, we should undoubtedly substitute ' Germanic.' Shelley's inad- 
 vertence is surprising. 
 
 27 9 ff. The principle of equality, etc. Cf. Plato, Republic 416-7 
 (Jowett's trans. 3. 294-5) : " Then now let us consider what will be 
 their way of life, if they are to realize our idea of them. In the first 
 place, none of them should have any property beyond what is abso- 
 lutely necessary; neither should they have a private house or treasury 
 closed against any one who has a mind to enter; their provisions 
 should be only such as are required by trained warriors, who are men 
 of temperance and courage; they should agree to receive from the 
 citizens a fixed rate of pay, enough to meet the expenses of the year 
 and no more, and they will go to mess and live together like soldiers 
 in a camp. Gold and silver we will tell them that they have from 
 God; the diviner metal is within them, and they have therefore no
 
 NOTES. 73 
 
 need of the other earthly dross which passes under the name of gold, 
 and ought not to pollute the divine by earthly admixture, for that com- 
 moner metal has been the source of many unholy deeds; but their own 
 is undefiled. . . . And this will be their salvation, and the salvation 
 of the State. But should they ever acquire homes or lands or moneys 
 of their own, they will become housekeepers and husbandmen instead of 
 guardians, enemies and tyrants instead of allies of the other citizens ; 
 hating and being hated, plotting and being plotted against, they will 
 pass through life in much greater terror of internal than of external 
 enemies, and the hour of ruin, both to themselves and to the rest of 
 the State, will be at hand." 
 
 28 20-21. Galeotto, etc. " Galeotto was the book and he who wrote 
 it." Dante, Inf. 5. 137. 
 
 28 22. Petrarch. Cf. Shelley's Discourse on the Manners of the 
 Ancients : " Perhaps nothing has been discovered in the fragments of 
 the Greek lyric poets equivalent to the sublime and chivalric sensibility 
 of Petrarch." 
 
 28 33. Vita Nuova. Of this there are excellent translations by Ros- 
 setti, Dante and his Circle, and by Charles Eliot Norton. 
 
 29 7-8. The most glorious imagination of modern poetry. Cf. Shel- 
 ley's Discourse on the Manners of the Ancients : " Perhaps Dante cre- 
 ated imaginations of greater loveliness and energy than any that are to 
 be found in the ancient literature of Greece." 
 
 29 18. Dissonance of arms. Cf. Longfellow, The A rsenal at Spring- 
 field: 
 
 Peace ! and no longer from its brazen portals 
 The blast of War's great organ shakes the skies ! 
 But beautiful as songs of the immortals, 
 The holy melodies of love arise. 
 
 29 27-28. The error which confounded diversity with inequality. 
 The truer doctrine has been expressed by Tennyson, Princess 7. 259- 
 
 287: 
 
 For woman is no4 undevelopt man, 
 
 But diverse ; could we make her as the man, 
 
 Sweet love were slain ; his dearest bond is this, 
 
 Not like to like, but like in difference. 
 
 Yet in the long years liker must they grow ; 
 
 The man be more of woman, she of man ; 
 
 He gain in sweetness and in moral height, 
 
 Nor lose the wrestling thews that throw the world ; 
 
 She mental breadth, nor fail in childward care, 
 
 Nr lose the childlike in the larger mind ;
 
 74 NOTES. 
 
 Till at the last she set herself to man, 
 
 Like perfect music unto noble words ; 
 
 And so these twain, upon the skirts of Time, 
 
 Sit side by side, full-sum m'd in all their powers, 
 
 Dispensing harvest, sowing the To-be, 
 
 Self-reverent each and reverencing each, 
 
 Distinct in individualities, 
 
 But like each other ev'n as those who love. 
 
 . . . Seeing either sex alone 
 Is half itself, and in true marriage lies 
 Nor equal, nor unequal ; each fulfils 
 Defect in each, and always thought in thought, 
 Purpose in purpose, will in will, they grow. 
 
 30 12. Riphaus. See Dante, Paradiso 20. 67-69, 118-124 : 
 
 Who would believe, down in the errant world, 
 That e'er the Trojan Ripheus in this round 
 Could be the fifth one of the holy lights? 
 . . . Through grace, that from so deep 
 A fountain wells that never hath the eye 
 Of any creature reached its primal wave, 
 Set all his love below on righteousness ; 
 Wherefore from grace to grace did God unclose 
 His eye to our redemption yet to be, 
 Whence he believed therein. 
 
 Cf. Plumptre's note on Paradiso 19. 70, in his translation of the 
 Divine Comedy : " How can the justice of God be reconciled with the 
 condemnation of the heathen who have sought righteousness, and yet 
 have lived and died without baptism and in ignorance of the faith? 
 Dante has no other solution than that of man's incapacity to measure 
 the Divine justice. ... It would be a miracle if Scripture presented 
 no such problems. Man must believe that God is good and righteous 
 in all his ways. If Dante does not go beyond this, we must remember 
 that he at least placed the righteous heathen in a state in which there 
 was only the pain of unsatisfied desire. ... It is significant that his 
 yearning after a wider hope grows stronger with his deepening faith 
 towards the close of life." 
 
 Justissimus unus. ^Eneid 2. 426-7 : " Rhipeus also falls, who was 
 above all others the most just among the Trojans, and the strictest 
 observer of right." 
 
 31 8-10. And (his bold neglect, etc. Cf. 14 32-15 4. 
 
 31 14. Laws of epic truth. For these consult the Poetics of Aristotle.
 
 NOTES. 75 
 
 32 1-2. Limed the wings of his swift spirit. See Hamlet 3. 3. 68-9 : 
 
 O limed soul, that, struggling to be free 
 Art more engaged. 
 
 32 6. Mock-birds. Mocking birds. 
 
 32 7. Apollonius Rhodius. Flourished 250-300 B.C. He is best 
 known by his Argonautics, a poem in four books (a translation in 
 Bonn's Library). Cf. Mahaffy, Hist. Grk. Lit. I. 147-152, or his 
 Greek Life and Thought, pp. 269-276. 
 
 32 8. Quintus (Calaber) Smyrn&us. Cf. Mahaffy, Hist. Grk. Lit. 
 I. 153 : " But we find no enduring result till the beginning of the fifth 
 century, when an epic school was founded, principally in Upper Egypt, 
 and of whom (sic) two representatives are well known Nonnus and 
 Musaeus. There are several others mentioned in the fuller literature 
 of the time. First, Quintus Smyrnaeus (called Calaber from the find- 
 ing there of the MS.), who wrote a continuation of Homer in fourteen 
 books, thus taking up the work of the cyclic poets, who were probably 
 lost before his time." 
 
 Nonnus. Mahaffy, Hist. Grk. Lit. I. 153: "Nonnus only, standing 
 between the living and the dead, composing, on the one hand, his long 
 epic on the adventures of Dionysus, and, on the other, his paraphrase 
 of St. John's Gospel into Homeric hexameters, is a most interesting 
 figure, though beyond the scope of the historian of Greek classical lit- 
 erature." 
 
 Lucan. Author of the Pharsalia (39-65 A.D.). See Cruttwell, 
 Hist. Rom. Lit., pp. 359-371. 
 
 Statius. Author of the Thebaid, and of an unfinished Achilleid 
 (6i-ca. 98 A.D.). Cruttwell, pp. 423-9. 
 
 32 9. Claudian. Close of fourth and beginning of fifth century A.D. 
 Author of Rape of Proserpine, besides panegyrical and other poems. 
 
 33 16-21. The age . . . invention. Cf. Sidney, Defense 3 8-15. 
 
 34 27-30. Let him spare to deface, etc. Cf. Selkirk, Ethics and Es- 
 thetics of Modern Poetry, pp. 205-6 : " In the civilisation whose pro- 
 gress is thoroughly sound, the education of the head and of the heart 
 should go abreast, and the assumed advancement in which poetry de- 
 clines is more than likely to be the civilisation of an age that sacrifices 
 its emotions to its reason. If this be true, we must be prepared to see 
 a good many other things decline. First after poetry, perhaps religion, 
 and after that the possibility of political cohesion. If we read history 
 carefully enough, we shall find, in most cases, that this lopsided civilisa- 
 tion, under some very high-sounding aliases, ' Perfectibility of Human
 
 76 NOTES. 
 
 Nature,' 'Age of Reason,' and so forth, has a trick of moving in a 
 circle, and playing itself out. By-and-by the neglected half of human 
 nature has its rvenge. The fatal flaw in this emotionless culture is 
 that it contains no sort of human amalgam strong enough to bind soci- 
 ety together. The individual forces composing it are what Lord Palm- 
 erston would have called ' a fortuitous concourse of atoms,' and possess 
 no element of political adherence. The forgotten thing that under the 
 name of Emotion was allowed to fall asleep as quiet as a lamb the 
 busy worshippers of Reason taking no note of the fact awakens one 
 day with a changed name and a changed nature. It is now a lion. 
 Spurned Emotion has grown to Rage, an easy transition. Renewed 
 by his sleep, the lion rises up and scowls around him, rushes into soci- 
 ety with his tail in the air, inaugurates a Reign of Terror, and reasserts 
 the sovereignty of the brute. When the mad fit has gone, and the long 
 arrears to the heart have been paid for in blood, cash down, society 
 sits down again, clothed and in its right mind. The Sisyphus of civil- 
 isation finds himself again at the foot of the hill, glad to accept a phi- 
 losophy that, if less high-sounding and pretentious, is at least a good 
 deal more human." 
 
 35 2. Exasperate. In the etymological sense. Cf. exasperation, 
 37 28. 
 
 35 4-6. To him that hath, etc. An inexact quotation. See Mark 
 4. 25 : "For he that hath, to him shall be given; and he that hath not, 
 from him shall be taken even that which he hath." Other forms, but 
 none identical with Shelley's version, may be found in Matt. 13. 12 and 
 25. 29; Luke 8. 1 8 and 19. 26. 
 
 35 23-24. The melancholy which is inseparable from the sweetest 
 melody. So in Shelley's To a Skylark : 
 
 Our sincerest laughter 
 With some pain is fraught ; 
 Our sweetest songs are those that tell of saddest thought. 
 
 And Shakespeare, Merck. Ven. 5. i. 69: "I am never merry when I 
 hear sweet music." 
 
 35 27-28. // is better to go, etc. Another example of inexact quota- 
 tion. See Eccl. 7. 2 : " It is better to go to the house of mourning, 
 than to go to the house of feasting." 
 
 36 15. The Inquisition in Spain. Abolished in 1808, it was again 
 revived by Ferdinand VII., and again suppressed in 1820, the year be- 
 fore Shelley wrote the Defense. 
 
 37 12-13. / dare not, etc. Macbeth \ . 7. 45.
 
 NOTES. 77 
 
 38 2. God and Mammon. Matt. 6. 24 : " Ye cannot serve God and 
 mammon." 
 
 38 27-29. As the odor, etc. Cf. 8 19-21. 
 
 39 7. A man cannot say, " I will compose poetry." Cf. Sidney, De- 
 fense 46 2021 : " A poet no industry can make, if his own genius be 
 not carried into it." 
 
 39 25. 7/ii? toil and the delay, etc. Such toil seems to be recom- 
 mended by Dante ; cf. his treatise On the Vulgar Tongue, Bk. 2, ch. 4 
 (Howell's trans.) : " But these poets differ from the great poets that 
 is, the regular ones, for these last have written poetry with stately 
 language and regular art, whereas the others, as has been said, write 
 by chance. It therefore happens that the nearer we approach to the 
 great poets, the more correct is the poetry we write. . . . The proper 
 result can never be attained without strenuous efforts of genius, con- 
 stant practice in the art, and fully available knowledge. . . . And here 
 let the folly of those stand confessed who, innocent of art and knowl- 
 edge, and trusting to genius alone, rush forward to sing of the highest 
 subjects in the highest style." 
 
 40 2. Unpremeditated. Milton (P. L. 9. 21-24) speaks of his 
 
 " celestial Patroness," 
 
 Who deigns 
 
 Her nightly visitation unimplored, 
 And dictates to me slumbering, or inspires 
 Easy my unpremeditated verse. 
 
 40 23-25. // is as it were the interpretation of a diviner nature 
 through our own. Cf. Plato, fan 533-4 (Shelley's trans.) : " For the 
 authors of those great poems which we admire do not attain to excel- 
 lence through the rules of any art, but they utter their beautiful melo- 
 dies of verse in a state of inspiration, and, as it were, possessed by a 
 spirit not their own. Thus the composers of lyrical poetry create those 
 admired songs of theirs in a state of divine insanity, like the Cory- 
 bantes, who lose all control over their reason in the enthusiasm of the 
 sacred dance, and during this supernatural possession are excited to 
 the rhythm and harmony which they communicate to men. . . . For 
 a poet is indeed a thing ethereally light, winged, and sacred, nor can 
 he compose any thing worth calling poetry until he becomes inspired 
 and as it were mad, or whilst any reason remains in him. For whilst 
 a man retains any portion of the thing called reason, he is utterly in- 
 competent to produce poetry, or to vaticinate. Thus those who declaim 
 various and beautiful poetry upon any subject, as for instance upon 
 Homer, are not enabled to do so by art or study; but every rhapsodist
 
 78 NOTES. 
 
 or poet, whether dithyrambic, encomiastic, choral, epic, or iambic, is 
 excellent in proportion to the extent of his participation in the divine 
 influence and the degree in which the Muse itself has descended on 
 him. In other respects poets may be sufficiently ignorant and inca- 
 pable. For they do not compose according to any art which they have 
 acquired, but from the impulse of the divinity within them; for did 
 they know any rules of criticism, according to which they could com- 
 pose beautiful verses upon one subject, they would be able to exert the 
 same faculty with respect to all or any other. The God seems pur- 
 posely to have deprived all poets, prophets, and soothsayers of every 
 particle of reason and understanding, the better to adapt them to their 
 employment as his ministers and interpreters; and that we, their audi- 
 tors, may acknowledge that those who write so beautifully are pos- 
 sessed, and address us inspired by the God. A presumption in favor 
 of this opinion may be drawn from the circumstance of Tynnichus the 
 Chalcidian having composed no other poem worth mentioning except 
 the famous poem which is in every body's mouth, perhaps the most 
 beautiful of all lyrical compositions, and which he himself calls a gift 
 of the Muses. I think you will agree with me that examples of this 
 sort are exhibited by the God himself to prove that those beautiful 
 poems are not human nor from man, but divine and from the Gods, 
 and that poets are only the inspired interpreters of the Gods, each ex- 
 cellent in proportion to the degree of his inspiration. This example of 
 the most beautiful of lyrics having been produced by a poet in other 
 respects the worst seems to have been afforded as a divine evidence of 
 the truth of this opinion." 
 
 41 5-8. A -word, a trait . . . will touch the enchanted chord. Gf. 
 Byron, Childe Harold Bk. 4, stanza 23 : 
 
 And slight withal may be the things that bring 
 
 Back on the heart the weight which it would fling 
 
 Aside for ever : it may be a sound 
 
 A tone of music summer's eve or spring 
 
 A flower the wind the ocean which shall wound, 
 
 Striking the electric chain wherewith we are darkly bound. 
 
 425-6. The mind, etc.. Paradise Lost I. 254-5. 
 
 42 19-20. // creates anew the universe. Cf. Sidney, Defense of 
 Poesy 7 26-9 5. 
 
 42 23. Words of Tasso. Somewhat differently quoted in Shelley's 
 letter to Peacock of i6th August, 1818, where it stands: Non c'e in 
 mondo chi merita nome di creatore, che Dio ed il Poeta. In either
 
 NOTES. 79 
 
 case the translation would be much the same : None merits the name 
 of creator except God and the poet. Cf. Sidney, Defense of Poesy 8 27- 
 30 : " But rather give right honor to the Heavenly Maker of that 
 maker, who, having made man to His own likeness, set him beyond 
 and over all the works of that second nature." 
 
 43 7. Confirm. There is a variant reading, confine. 
 
 43 13. " There sitting where we dare not soar." Adapted from Mil- 
 ton, P. L. 4. 829 : 
 
 Ye knew me once no mate 
 For you, there sitting where ye durst not soar. 
 
 43 21-31. This passage is framed out of Scriptural reminiscences. 
 Some or all of the following sentences must have been present to Shel- 
 ley's mind : 
 
 Dan. 5. 27. Thou art weighed in the balances, and art found wanting. 
 
 Isa. 40. 15. Behold the nations are as a drop of a bucket, and are 
 counted as the small dust of the balance. 
 
 Isa. i. 18. Though your sins be as scarlet, they shall be as white as 
 snow. 
 
 Rev. 7. 14. Washed their robes, and made them white in the blood of 
 the Lamb. 
 
 Heb. 9. 15. The mediator of the new testament, that by means of 
 death, for the redemption of the transgressions that were under the first 
 testament. . . . 
 
 Heb. 12. 24. And to Jesus the mediator of the new covenant, and to 
 the blood of sprinkling. 
 
 Matt. 7. i. Judge not, that ye be not judged. 
 
 44 26. The passions purely evil. Shelley seems to have in mind 
 some such classification of sins into lesser and greater as Dante adopts 
 in the Inferno. The threefold division of Dante is into sins of I. In- 
 continence. II. Malice. III. Bestiality. Of these the former are 
 regarded as the more venial, the latter as the more deadly. For the 
 subdivisions, see Longfellow's Notes to the Inferno, the portion pre- 
 ceding the Commentary on Canto I., or Miss Rossetti's Shadow of 
 Dante, ch. 5. 
 
 44 32. A polemical reply. To the essay of Peacock, for which see 
 pp. 47-61. 
 
 45 6. 7, like them, etc. This statement is illustrated by the follow- 
 ing quotation from one of Shelley's letters to Peacock (Peacock's 
 Works 3. 473; Shelley's Prose Works, Fonnan's edition, 4. 196-7) :
 
 80 NOTES. 
 
 " PISA, March ai, 1821. 
 
 "MY DEAR PEACOCK, 
 
 " I dispatch by this post the first part of an essay intended to 
 consist of three parts, which I design as an antidote to your ' Four Ages 
 of Poetry.' You will see that I have taken a more general view of what 
 is poetry than you have, and will perhaps agree with several of my posi- 
 tions, without considering your own touched. But read and judge ; and 
 do not let us imitate the great founders of the picturesque, Price and Payne 
 Knight, who, like two ill-trained beagles, began snarling at each other when 
 they could not catch the hare. 
 
 " I hear the welcome news of a box from England announced by the 
 Gisbornes. How much new poetry does it contain? The Bavii and Msevii 
 of the day are very fertile ; and I wish those who honor me with boxes 
 would read and inwardly digest your ' Four Ages of Poetry ' ; for I had 
 much rather, for my own private reading, receive political, geological, and 
 moral treatises than this stuff in terza, ottava, and tremillesima rima, whose 
 earthly baseness has attracted the lightning of your undiscriminating cen- 
 sure upon the temple of immortal song. These verses enrage me far more 
 than those of Codrus did Juvenal, and with better reason. Juvenal need 
 not have been stunned unless he had liked it ; but my boxes are packed 
 with this trash, to the exclusion of better matter." 
 
 45 7. Codri. Codrus was perhaps a fictitious name. In any case 
 a tragedy on the subject of Theseus is attributed to a certain Codrus, 
 or, as some manuscripts read, Cordus, by Juvenal, who at the begin- 
 ning of his First Satire speaks of the author and his production in 
 terms of bitter railing (Juv. Sat. I. 1-2): "What! always a mere 
 hearer? What, never to retort, bored as I am so often by the Theseid 
 of Cordus hoarse with reciting?" See also the last note. 
 
 45 8. Bavins and Mavius. Associated together by Virgil, Ed. 
 3. 90 : " Let him that hates not Bavius, love your verses, Msevius." 
 Msevius is likewise the object of Horace's detestation (Epode 10). In 
 Smith's Diet, of Greek and Roman Biography it is said of them : " Ba- 
 vius and Msevius, whose names have become a byword of scorn for all 
 jealous and malevolent poetasters, owe their unenviable immortality to 
 the enmity which they displayed toward the rising genius of the most 
 distinguished of their contemporaries." See also note on 45 6. 
 
 45 21. The second part. This was never written. 
 
 45 31. Low-thoughted. An epithet borrowed from Milton, Comus 6 : 
 '* low-thoughted care." 
 
 46 10 ff. The persons, etc. The thought seems to owe something to 
 the arguments of Plato's Ion. See note on 40 23-25. 
 
 46 32. Legislators. Cf. 6 1-3.
 
 INDEX OF PROPER NAMES. 
 
 Accius 24 3. 
 
 Achilles 12 11. 
 
 Addison 19 24. 
 
 .Eschylus 6 21 (Agamemnon 17 
 
 10). 
 
 Apollonius Rhodius 32 7. 
 Ariosto 29 19 (Orlando Furioso 
 
 32 13,404). 
 
 Bacon 5 4, 9 19, 36 19, 43 17. 
 Bavius 45 8. 
 Beatrice 29 4. 
 Boccaccio 33 17, 36 18. 
 
 Calderon 17 20, 29 20, 36 19. 
 Camillus 24 21. 
 Camoens (Lusiad 32 14). 
 Catullus 24 9. 
 Charles II. 20 3. 
 Chaucer 33 19, 36 18. 
 Cicero 9 17. 
 Claudian 32 9. 
 Codrus (Codri 45 7). 
 
 Dante 6 22, 10 5, 28 31, 29 33, 30 
 3, 10, 31 28, 32 15, 21, 24, 33 17, 
 36 18 (Divina Commedia 29 10, 
 31 18; VitaNuova2833). 
 
 David 25 21. 
 
 Ennius 24 2. 
 Euripides 14 33. 
 
 Gibbon 36 5. 
 
 Hannibal 24 24. 
 
 Hector 12 11. 
 
 Herodotus 11 6. 
 
 Homer 12 3, 7, 14 29, 15 5, 21 32, 
 
 31 28, 43 14. 
 Horace 24 9, 43 15. 
 Hume 36 5. 
 
 Isaiah 25 21. 
 
 Jesus Christ 25 22, 26 13, 27 21. 
 Job 6 22, 25 20. 
 
 Livy 11 6, 8, 24 8. 
 Locke 36 5. 
 Lucan 15 l, 32 8. 
 Lucretius 24 4, 32 1. 
 Lusiad, see Camoens. 
 Luther 32 22. 
 
 Machiavelli 20 33. 
 
 Msevius 45 8. 
 
 Michael Angelo 36 20. 
 
 Milton 10 5, 20 6, 30 4, 16, 29, 31 
 5, 10, 32 10, 15, 36 19, 39 32 (Par- 
 adise Lost 30 20, 31 19, 39 32). 
 
 Moses 25 20. 
 
 Nonnus 32 8. 
 Ovid 24 9. 
 
 Pacuvius 24 3. 
 
 Petrarch 28 22, 32, 33 17, 36 18. 
 
 Plato 9 8, 25 29, 27 11, 17, 29 14.
 
 82 
 
 INDEX OF PROPER NAMES. 
 
 Plutarch 11 6. 
 Pythagoras 27 18. 
 
 Quintus Smyrnaeus 32 8. 
 
 Raphael 36 20, 43 17. 
 Regulus 24 22. 
 Riphseus 30 12. 
 Rousseau 29 20, 36 6. 
 
 Shakespeare 10 5, 17 22, 29 20, 36 
 19 (King Lear 17 6, 9, 14). 
 
 Socrates 15 21. 
 
 Solomon 25 21. 
 
 Sophocles 21 33 (CEdipus Tyran- 
 nus 179). 
 
 Spenser 15 l, 29 20, 43 18 (Fairy 
 
 Queen 32 14). 
 Statius 32 9. 
 
 Tasso 15 l, 29 20, 42 23, 43 16 
 (Gerusalemme Liberata 32 13). 
 Theocritus 23 2. 
 Timasus 27 18. 
 
 Ulysses 12 11. 
 
 Varro 24 3. 
 
 Virgil 24 4, 30 12, 32 3, 43 15 
 
 (^ineid 32 12). 
 Voltaire 36 5.
 
 ANALYSIS. 
 
 THE ELEMENTS AND PRINCIPLES OF POETRY. 
 
 I. Poetry the Expression of the Imagination, as distinguished from that 
 of the Reasoning Faculty, 1 111 12. 
 
 A. Inferiority of reason to imagination, 1 1 2 5. 
 
 B. Poetry, which always exists in the infancy of society, is a prod- 
 
 uct of the soul's imitative, yet creative activity, 2 13 31. 
 
 1. Occasioned by impressions from without, 2 1 3 2. 
 
 2. A reflex of the social sympathies, 3 2 31. 
 
 C. Poets are those, the creative activity of whose imagination 
 
 causes the purest and most intense pleasure to others, 
 3 325 19. 
 
 I. The language they employ marks the before unapprehended 
 relations of things, and its very words are fragmentary 
 poetry, 4 275 19. 
 
 D. The harmony perceived and rendered by the poets is mani- 
 
 fested not only through the medium of form, sound, and 
 color, but also through inventions and institutions, 5 20 6 26. 
 I. To the poet distinctions of time and place disappear, and 
 his intense perception of the present is also a discovery of 
 the future, in so far as the sequence of events is disclosed 
 as orderly and organic to the eye of his soul, 5 316 26. 
 
 E. Yet language is the best medium for poetic expression, because 
 
 less refractory and more plastic than any other, 6 27 7 32. 
 
 1. Poetry may be denned as those arrangements of language 
 which are effected by the creative imagination, 6 317 17. 
 
 2. The fame of other artists and originators inferior to that of 
 poets, 7 1732. 
 
 F. Poetry rhythmical, but not necessarily metrical, 7 3310 7. 
 
 1. Translation of poetry impossible, since its music can never 
 be reproduced, 8 825. 
 
 2. Distinction between poets and prose writers a vulgar 
 error, 8 269 33.
 
 84 ANAL YSIS. 
 
 3. Creative poets and persuasive original philosophers prac- 
 tically identical, 9 3310 7. 
 G. Superiority of poetry to history, 10 811 12. 
 
 I. But the fragments of a history may be poetical, 1033 
 1112. 
 
 II. The Effects of Poetry, 11 1333 26. 
 
 A. Poetry gives delight, 11 16-12 7. 
 
 B. Poetry is an instrument of moral improvement, 12 713 14. 
 
 I. And this notwithstanding the moral conventionalities of 
 his time and place, which the poet cannot help observing, 
 
 12 19-13 14. 
 
 C. Poetry more efficacious for good than moral philosophy, 
 
 13 15-15 4. 
 
 I. But poets must not moralize, in the restricted sense, 
 
 14 21-15 4. 
 
 D. Historical review of European poetry, 15 5 33 26. 
 
 1. Grecian poetry, 15 523 22. 
 
 a. The perfection of the lyric and the drama at Athens 
 
 will serve as the index of Athenian greatness in 
 general, 15 521 8. 
 aa. The Athenian drama in the main superior to 
 
 every other, 16 6 17 30. 
 
 a. Reservation in favor of tragicomedy; King 
 Lear the most perfect specimen of dra- 
 matic art in the world, 17 2 30. 
 bb. The degeneracy of the drama always connected 
 with the elimination of its poetry, 17 31 
 218. 
 a. The ennobling effects of the drama at its 
 
 best estate, 18 1219 12. 
 
 B. The decay of the drama accompanies the 
 decay of social life; the Restoration plays 
 are an example, 19 1320 20. 
 y. Necessity of regenerating the drama when 
 it has been debased, 20 2121 8. 
 
 b. Inferiority of the Alexandrian writers, though creative 
 
 imagination is not yet wholly extinct, 21 923 22. 
 
 2. Roman poetry, 23 2325 5. 
 
 a. Poetry an exotic at Rome, 23 2324 17. 
 
 b. The Romans excelled rather in the poetry of action, 
 
 24 17-25 5.
 
 ANAL YSIS. 85 
 
 3. Poetry under Christian influences, 25 633 26. 
 
 a. Christianity the cosmical principle of a world other- 
 
 wise anarchic, 25 6-19. 
 
 b. Effect of Hebrew poetry upon that of Christianity, 
 
 25 20-25. 
 
 c. The darkness of the Middle Ages results from the ob- 
 
 scuration of the poetic principle, 25 25 27 6. 
 
 d. Efflorescence of Christian poetry about the eleventh 
 
 century, 27 728 1. 
 
 e. The abolition of slavery and the emancipation of 
 
 woman, 28 1-15. 
 
 f. Poetry revives among the Provencals and with Pe- 
 
 trarch, 28 15-31. 
 
 g. Dante the great poet of purified and exalted love, 
 
 28 31-29 19. 
 h. Italian, English, Spanish, and French exponents of this 
 
 new poetry, 29 19-32. 
 i. The strength of their insight made Dante and Milton 
 
 superior to their times, that is, heretical in some 
 
 of their views, 29 3331 27. 
 j. Dante and Milton stand respectively second and third 
 
 among epic poets, not even Virgil being worthy of 
 
 so exalted a place, much less Ariosto, Tasso, Camo- 
 
 ens, or Spenser, 31 2832 14. 
 
 k. Dante the leader of Italian reformers, poets, and hu- 
 manists; the successive unfoldings of poetic truth, 
 
 32 15-33 15. 
 /. Italian poetry caused a revival of the other arts, and of 
 
 English literature, 33 16-21. 
 
 III. The Superiority of Poetry to Science and Political Philosophy, 
 33 27-40 13. 
 
 A. Two species of utility, corresponding to two kinds of pleasure', 
 
 the higher producing a pleasure durable, universal, and 
 permanent, the lower a pleasure transitory and particular, 
 33 2734 17. 
 
 B. The mere reasoner useful in a limited sense, yet he must 
 
 beware of exceeding his appointed limits, 34 18 35 11. 
 
 C. Poets and poetical philosophers produce the higher pleas- 
 
 ure, though one that is inseparable from pain, 35 12 
 364.
 
 86 ANAL YSIS. 
 
 D. The world could have dispensed with critics, reasoners, and 
 
 political philosophers, but never with poets, 36 5-33. 
 
 E. At present, calculation has outrun conception, and deeds do 
 
 not keep pace with knowledge, 37 138 2. 
 
 F. Poetry would give us an enlarged power over things, 38 3-15. 
 
 G. Poetry the centre, the life, the essence of all science, 38 16 
 
 395. 
 H. Poetry incapable of being produced at will, 39 540 13. 
 
 IV. The Diviner Sources and Effects of Poetry, 40 1444 27. 
 
 A. Poets visited by transient inspirations, which, in recording, 
 
 they transmute into immortal benefits to mankind, 40 14 
 41 21. 
 
 B. Poetry exorcises evil, enhances beauty, reconciles contradic- 
 
 tions, banishes the commonplace, and creates the world 
 anew, 41 2242 24. 
 
 C. The poet, as poet, is the happiest, best, wisest, and most illus- 
 
 trious of men, 42 25 43 31. 
 
 1. But as man, being more susceptible to pain and pleasure, 
 he is more sorely tempted than others, 43 32 44 23. 
 
 2. Still, the purely evil passions have little control over him, 
 44 24-27. 
 
 V. Concluding Observations, 44 2846 32. 
 
 A. Digression concerning the particular occasion of the essay, 
 
 44 2845 20. 
 
 B. Announcement of a second part, to be a defense of modern 
 
 poetry in particular, 45 21-26. 
 
 C. This poetry likely to be the precursor of a new spiritual awak- 
 
 ening to England, 45 2646 3. 
 
 D. Poets the unconscious heralds of larger dispensations, 46 4-32.
 
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