The accident did not produce the slightest effect on the gravity of the house, so strongly had he impressed every one with his own emotions. Some of my friends (H. C.* for instance) doubt whether poetry on contemporary persons and events can be good. But I instance Spenser's Marriage, and Milton's Lycidas. True, the Persæ is one of the worst of Eschylus's plays; at least, in my opinion. He See the Milton is falsely represented by some as a democrat. was an aristocrat in the truest sense of the word. quotation from him in my Convention of Cintra.t Indeed, he spoke in very proud and contemptuous terms of the populace. Comus is rich in beautiful and sweet flowers, and in exuberant leaves of genius; but the ripe and mellow fruit is in Samson Agonistes. When he wrote that, his mind was Hebraized. Indeed, his genius fed on the writings of the Hebrew prophets. This arose, in some degree, from the temper of the times; the Puritan lived in the Old Testament, almost to the exclusion of the New. The works of the old English dramatists are the gardens of our language. One of the noblest things in Milton is the description of that sweet quiet morning in the Paradise Regained, after that terrible night of howling wind and storm. trast is divine. ‡ What a virulent democrat The con is! A man ill at ease with his own conscience is sure to quarrel with all government, order, and law. The influence of Locke's Essay was not due to its own merits, which are considerable; but to external circum * He doubtless refers to Hartley Coleridge. + Page 191 of the edition of 1809. Paradise Regained, iv. 431. 14 + stances. It came forth at a happy opportunity, and coincided with the prevalent opinions of the time. The Jesuit doctrines concerning the papal power in deposing kings, and absolving subjects from their allegiance, had driven some Protestant theologians to take refuge in the theory of the divine right of kings. This theory was unpalatable to the world at large, and others invented the more popular doctrine of a social contract, in its place; a doctrine which history refutes. But Locke did what he could to accommodate this principle to his own system. The only basis on which property can rest, is right derived from prescription. The best of Locke's works, as it seems to me, is that in which he attempts the least-his Conduct of the Understanding." In the summer of 1827, speaking of some of his contemporaries, Wordsworth said, "T. Moore has great natural genius; but he is too lavish of brilliant ornament. His poems smell of the perfumer's and milliner's shops. He is not content with a ring and a bracelet, but he must have rings in the ears, rings on the nose-rings everywhere. Walter Scott is not a careful composer. He allows himself many liberties, which betray a want of respect for his reader. For instance, he is too fond of inversions; i.e., he often places the verb before the substantive, and the accusative before the verb. W. Scott quoted, as from me, The swan on sweet St Mary's lake Floats double, swan and shadow, instead of still; thus obscuring my idea, and betraying his own uncritical principles of composition. Byron seems to me deficient in feeling. Professor Wilson, I think, used to say that Beppo was his best poem; because all his faults were there brought to a height. I never read the English Bards through. His critical prognostications have, for the most part, proved erroneous. Sir James Mackintosh said of me to M. de Staël, 'Wordsworth is not a great poet, but he is the greatest man among poets.' Madame de Staël complained of my style. Now whatever may be the result of my experiment in the subjects which I have chosen for poetical compositionbe they vulgar or be they not,-I can say without vanity, that I have bestowed great pains on my style, full as much as any of my contemporaries have done on theirs. I yield to none in love for my art. I, therefore, labour at it with reverence, affection, and industry. My main endeavour, as to style, has been that my poems should be written in pure intelligible English. Lord Byron has spoken severely of my compositions. However faulty they may be, I do not think that I ever could have prevailed upon myself to print such lines as he has done; for instance, I stood at Venice on the bridge of Sighs, A palace and a prison on each hand. Some person ought to write a critical review, analysing Lord Byron's language, in order to guard others against imitating him in these respects. Shelley is one of the best artists of us all: I mean in workmanship of style. S, in the work you mentioned to me, confounds imagery and imagination. Sensible objects really existing, and felt to exist, are imagery; and they may form the materials of a descriptive poem, where objects are delineated as they are. Imagination is a subjective term: it deals with objects not as they are, but as they appear to the mind of the poet. The imagination is that intellectual lens through the medium of which the poetical observer sees the objects of his observation, modified both in form and colour; or it is that inventive dresser of dramatic tableaux, by which the persons of the play are invested with new drapery, or placed in new attitudes; or it is that chemical faculty by which elements of the most different nature and distant origin are blended together into one harmonious and homogeneous whole. A beautiful instance of the modifying and investive power of imagination may be seen in that noble passage of Dyer's Ruins of Rome,* where the poet hears the voice of Time; and in Thomson's description of the streets of Cairo, expecting the arrival of the caravan which had perished in the storm.† Read all Cowley; he is very valuable to a collector of English sound sense. Burns's Scots wha hae' is poor as a lyric composition. Ariosto and Tasso are very absurdly depressed in order to elevate Dante. Ariosto is not always sincere; Spenser always so. I have tried to read Göethe. I never could succeed. Mr refers me to his Iphigenia, but I there recognise none of the dignified simplicity, none of the health and vigour which the heroes and heroines of antiquity possess in the writings of Homer. The lines of Lucretius describing the immolation of Iphigenia are worth the whole of Göethe's long poem. Again, there is a profligacy, an inhuman sensuality, in his works which is utterly revolting. not intimately acquainted with them generally. I am But I * 1. 37 : The pilgrim oft, At dead of night, 'mid his oraison, hears + Thomson's Summer, 980: In Cairo's crowded streets, The impatient merchant, wondering, waits in vain, take up my ground on the first canto of Wilhelm Meister; and, as the attorney-general of human nature, I there indict. him for wantonly outraging the sympathies of humanity. Theologians tell us of the degraded nature of man; and they tell us what is true. Yet man is essentially a moral agent, and there is that immortal and unextinguishable yearning for something pure and spiritual which will plead against these poetical sensualists as long as man remains what he is. Scientific men are often too fond of aiming to be men of the world. They crave too much for titles, and stars, and ribbons. If Bacon had dwelt only in the court of Nature, and cared less for that of James the First, he would have been a greater man, and a happier one too. I heard lately from young Mr Watt a noble instance of magnanimity in an eminent French chemist. He had made a discovery, which he was informed would, if he took out a patent, realise a large fortune. 'No,' said he, "I do not live to amass money, but to discover truth: and, as long as she attends me in my investigations, so long will I serve her, and her only.' Sir I know from my own experience was ruined by prosperity. The age of Leo X. would have shone with greater brilliance if it had had more clouds to struggle with. The age of Louis XIV. was formed by the Port Royal amid the storms and thunders of the League. Racine lived in a court till it became necessary to his existence, as his miserable death proved. Those petty courts of Germany have been injurious to its literature. They who move in them are too prone to imagine themselves to be the whole world, and compared with the whole world they are nothing more than these little specks in the texture of this hearth-rug.... Patriarchal usages have not quite deserted us of these |