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 His criticism is very distinct in kind. It is almost purely 
 and in the strict and proper sense agsthetic — that is to say, it 
 does hardly anything but reproduce the sensations produced 
 upon Hunt himself by the reading of his favorite passages. 
 As his sense of poetry was extraordinarily keen and accurate, 
 there is perhaps no body of ' beauties ' of English poetry to be 
 found anywhere in the language which is selected with such 
 uniform and unerring judgment as this or these. . . . The 
 worst that can be said of Leigh Hunt's general critical axioms 
 and conclusions is that they are much better than the reasons 
 that support them. For instance, he is probably right in 
 calling the famous 'intellectual' and 'henpecked you all,' in 
 Don Jua7i [see p. 63], 'the happiest triple rime ever written.' 
 But when he goes on to say that ' the sweepingness of the 
 assumption completes the flowing breadth of the effect,' he 
 goes very near to talking nonsense. For most peoi^le, however, 
 a true opinion persuasively stated is of much more consequence 
 than the most elaborate logical justification of it; and it is this 
 that makes Leigh Hunt's criticism such excellent good read- 
 ing. ... As a rule he avoids the things that he is not qualified 
 to judge, such as the rougher and sublimer parts of poetry. 
 Of its sweetness and its music, of its grace and its wit, of its 
 tenderness and its fancy, no better judge ever existed tlian 
 Leigh Hunt. 
 
 Saintsbury, Essays in English Literature, pp. 223-226.
 
 ,r«^.^ 
 
 ilciglx Hunt 
 
 AN ANSWER TO THE QUESTION 
 
 'WHAT IS POETRY?' 
 
 INCLUDING 
 
 REMARKS ON VERSIFICATION 
 
 EDITED BY 
 
 ALBERT S. COOK 
 
 PROFESSOR OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE AND LITEKATLKE 
 IN YALE UNIVERSITY 
 
 4-128^ 
 
 GINN AND COMPANY 
 
 BOSTON • NEW YORK • CHICAGO • LONDON
 
 CoPVRIflHT, 1893, 
 
 By ALI'.ERT S. COOK. 
 
 Ail Rights Reserved. 
 614.1 
 
 Clje atbtnatum jPrcgg 
 
 f,I.N.M AM; COMPANY- I'l<(> 
 I'KILTORS ■ BOSTON • U.S.A.
 
 PN 
 
 PREFACE. 
 
 The essay here reprinted is the initial one in 
 Leigh Hunt's Imagmation and Faticy, which is 
 among the very best of his prose works. In the 
 Preface to that vohime, which was published in 
 1844, he thus describes his object in writing it : 
 "to furnish such an account, in an Essay, of the 
 nature and requirements of poetry, as may eatable 
 readers in general to give an answer on those points 
 to themselves and others ^ The whole volume is 
 suggestive, so much so that Ruskin refers to it as 
 an "admirable piece of criticism," and adds that it 
 "ought to be read with care" {Modern Painters, 
 Vol. III., ' Of Imagination Penetrative '). Still, 
 the opening essay is the only part of the book 
 which bears the character of sustained exposition, 
 the remainder consisting mostly of poetical extracts, 
 with brief introductions and comments ; it is, accord- 
 ingly the part which is likely to prove most accept- 
 able to students of the theory and art of poetry. 
 
 The author is frequently inaccurate in quotation ; 
 as there is no advantage, but rather loss, in pcrpct-
 
 VI PREFACE. 
 
 uatinii^ tlic results of inadvertence, I have endeav- 
 ored to verify all the passages cited, and to conform 
 them to the reading of the most authoritative editions. 
 In the cases where I have not succeeded, I shall be 
 grateful for information from those who are better 
 read. With reference to the use of italics for 
 emphasis, in which Hunt abounds, I need scarcely 
 say that I have made no change. 
 
 As Leigh Hunt gave to the volume from which 
 this essay is taken the title of Imagination and 
 Fancy, and as he has much to say on these two 
 subjects, it has seemed to me that students might 
 be glad of the opportunity to consult with ease the 
 principal discussions of these two related faculties, 
 antecedent to the date of Hunt's volume. I have 
 therefore collected in a note near the end of this 
 book the chief passages from Coleridge and Words- 
 worth bearing upon this subject, together with 
 those from Jean Paul upon which Coleridge is 
 supposed to have built his theory. 
 
 Albert S. Cook. 
 
 Yalk Univrrsitv, Feb. 27, (893.
 
 AN ANSWER TO THE QUESTION 
 
 ■ WHAT IS POETRY? 
 
 INCLUDING 
 
 REMARKS ON VERSIFICATION 
 
 PotTRY, strictly and artistically so called, that ] 
 is to say, considered not merely as poetic feeling, \ 
 which is more or less shared by all the world, 
 but as the operation of that feeling, such as we 
 see it in the poet's book,' is the utterance of a 5 
 passion for truth, beauty, and power, embodying 
 and illustrating its conceptions by imagination, 
 and fancy, and modulating its language on the 
 principle of variety in uniformity. Its means are 
 whatever the universe contains ; and its ends, 10 
 pleasure and exaltation. Poetry stands between 
 nature and convention, keeping alive among us 
 the enjoyment of the external and the spiritual 
 world ; it has constituted the most enduring fame 
 of nations ; and, next to Love and Beauty, which 15 
 are its parents, is the greatest proof to man of
 
 2 POETRY IS A PASSION. 
 
 the pleasure to be found in all things, and of the 
 probable riches of infinitude. 
 
 Poetry is a passion,^ because it seeks the 
 deepest impressions ; and because it must undergo, 
 5 in order to convey them. 
 
 It is a passion for truth, because without truth 
 the impression would be false or defective. 
 
 It is a passion for beauty, because its office is 
 to exalt and refine by means of pleasure, and 
 10 because beauty is nothing but the loveliest form 
 of pleasure. 
 
 It is a passion for power, because power is 
 impression triumphant, whether over the poet, as 
 desired by himself, or over the reader, as affected 
 15 by the poet. 
 
 It embodies and illustrates its impressions by 
 
 imagination, or images of the objects of which it 
 
 treats, and other images brought in to throw light 
 
 on those objects, in order that it may enjoy and 
 
 20 impart the feeling of their truth in its utmost 
 
 conviction and affluence. 
 I It illustrates them by fancy, which is a lighter 
 play of imagination, or the feeling of analogy 
 coming short of seriousness, in order that it may 
 25 laugh with what it loves, and show how it can 
 decorate it with fairy ornament. 
 
 It modulates what it utters, because in running 
 the whole round of l)cauty it must needs include 
 beauty of sound ; and because, in the height of 
 
 * I'assio, suffering in a good sense, — ardent suljjection of one's 
 self to emotion. (Author's note.)
 
 POETRY IS IMAGINATIVE PASSION. 3 
 
 its enjoyment, it must show the perfection of its 
 triumph, and make difficulty itself become part of 
 its facility and joy. 
 
 And lastly, Poetry shapes this modulation into 
 uniformity for its outline, and variety for its 5 
 parts, because it thus realizes the last idea of 
 beauty itself, which includes the charm of diversity 
 within the flowing round of habit and ease. 
 
 Poetry is imaginative passion. The quickest ^v 
 and subtlest test of the possession of its essence 10 
 is in expression ; the variety of things to be 
 expressed shows the amount of its resources ; and 
 the continuity of the song completes the evidence 
 of its strength and greatness. He who has 
 thought, feeling, expression, imagination, action, 15 
 character, and continuity, all in the largest amount 
 and highest degree, is the greatest poet. "^ 
 
 Poetry includes whatsoever of painting can be 
 made visible to the mind's eye,^ and whatsoever 
 of music can be conveyed by sound and proportion 20 
 without singing or instrumentation. But it far 
 surpasses those divine arts in suggestiveness, 
 range, and intellectual wealth ; — the first, in 
 expression of thought, combination of images, 
 and the triumph over space and time ; the second, 25 
 in all that can be done by speech, apart from the 
 tones and modulations of pure sound. Painting 
 and music, however, include all those portions of 
 the gift of poetry that can be expressed and 
 heightened by the visible and melodious. Paint- 30 
 
 ^ But see the arguments in Lessing's Laokoon.
 
 4 POE TK Y BE YOND SCIENCE. 
 
 ing, in a certain apparent manner, is things them- 
 selves ; niiisic, in a certain audible manner, is 
 . their very emotion and grace. "" Music and paint- 
 ing are proud to be related to poetry, and poetry 
 5 loves and is proud of them. 
 
 Poetry begins where matter of fact or of science 
 
 ceases to be merely such, and to exhibit a further 
 
 truth, that is to say, the connection it has with 
 
 I the world of emotion, and its power to produce 
 
 [ 10 imaginative pleasure. Inquiring of a gardener, 
 
 for instance, what flower it is we see yonder, he 
 
 answers, 'A lily.' This is matter of fact. The 
 
 botanist pronounces it to be of the order of 
 
 ' Hcxandria monogynia.' ^ This is matter of 
 
 15 science. It is the 'lady' of the garden,^ says 
 
 Spenser ; and here we begin to have a poetical 
 
 sense of its fairness and grace. It is 
 
 The plant and flower of light., 
 
 I says Ben Jonson ;■'' and poetry then shows us the 
 20 beauty of the flower in all its mystery and 
 splendor. 
 
 If it be asked, how we know perceptions like 
 these to be true, the answer is, by the fact of 
 their cxi.stence — by the consent and delight of 
 25 poetic readers. And as feeling is the earliest 
 teacher, and perception the only final proof of 
 things the most demonstrable by science, so the 
 remotest- imaginations of the poets may often be 
 
 1 In the Linnaean system. 
 
 2 Rather of the 'flowering field.' See F. Q. 2. 6. 16. 
 
 3 In the Pin Jar ic Ode on the Death of Sir II. Morison.
 
 POETRY CONSISTENT WITH SCIENCE. 5 
 
 found to have the closest connection with matter 
 of fact ; perhaps might always be so, if the subtlety 
 of our perceptions were a match for the causes of 
 them. Consider this image of Ben Jonson's — of 
 a lily being the flower of light. Light, undecom- 5 
 posed, is white ; and as the lily is white, and 
 light is white, and whiteness itself is nothing but 
 light, the two things, so far, are not merely 
 similar, but identical. A poet might add, by 
 an analogy drawn from the connection of light 10 
 and color, that there is a 'golden dawn' issuing 
 out of the white lily, in the rich yellow of the 
 stamens. I have no desire to push this similarity 
 farther than it may be worth. Enough has been 
 stated to show that, in poetical as well as in 15 
 other analogies, 'the same feet of Nature,' as 
 Bacon says, may be seen 'treading in different 
 paths ' ; ^ and that the most scornful, that is to 
 say, dullest disciple of fact, should be cautious 
 how he betrays the shallowness of his philosophy ao 
 by discerning no poetry in its depths. 
 
 But the poet is far from dealing only with these 
 subtle and analogical truths. Truth of every kind 
 belongs to him, provided it can bud into any kind 
 of beauty, or is capable of being illustrated and 25 
 impressed by, the poetic faculty. Nay, the sim- 
 
 1 From the Advaitcemeiit of Learning 2. 5. 3: 'Neither are 
 these only similitudes, as men of narrow observation may 
 conceive them to be, but the same footsteps treading or printing 
 upon several subjects or matters.' Also in De A^igment Scient. 
 cap. I. lib. iii. (ed. of Spedding, Ellis, and Heath, i. 543). The 
 hint was probably taken from Shelley's Defense of Poetry, 5 4.
 
 6 /MPRESSIVENESS OF SIMPLICITY. 
 
 plest truth is often so beautiful and impressive of 
 itself, that one of the greatest proofs of his genius 
 consists in his leaving it to stand alone, illustrated 
 by nothing but the light of its own tears or smiles, 
 5 its own wonder, might, or playfulness. Hence 
 the complete effect of many a simple passage in 
 our old English ballads and romances, and of the 
 passionate sincerity in general of the greatest 
 early poets, such as Homer and Chaucer, who 
 
 10 flourished before the existence of a 'literary 
 world,' and were not perplexed by a heap of 
 notions and opinions, or by doubts how emotion 
 ought to be expressed. The greatest of their 
 successors never write equally to the purpose, 
 
 15 except when they can dismiss everything from 
 their minds but the like simple truth. In the 
 beautiful poem of Sir Eger, Sir Graham, and Sir 
 Gray-Steel (see it in Ellis's Specimens, or Laing's 
 Early Metrical Tales ^), a knight thinks himself 
 
 20 disgraced in the eyes of his mistress : — 
 
 Sir Eger .says,^ 'If it be so, 
 Then wot I well I must forgo 
 Love-liking, and manhood, all clean.' 
 The water rushed otit of his een I 
 
 25 Sir Gray-Steel is killed : — 
 
 Gray-Steel into his death thus thrawes [throes ?] 
 He waiters [welters, — throws himself about] and 
 the grass up drawes ; 
 
 « « « « « 
 
 1 Lines 773 - 776. A different version may be found in Bishop 
 Percy's Folio Maiiuscrif't i. 341-400. 
 ^Hunt, '.said.'
 
 SIMPLICITY AND BREVITY. 7 
 
 A little while then lay he still, 
 {Friends that him saw liked full ill) 
 And blood '^ into his armour bright.'^ 
 
 The abode of Chaucer's Reve, or Steward, in 
 the Canterbury Tales, is painted in two lines 5 
 which nobody ever wished longer : — 
 
 His wonyng [dwelling] was ful fair upon an heeth ; 
 With grene trees i-shadwcd was his place.^ 
 
 Every one knows the words of Lear, ' most 
 matter-of-fact, most melancholy ' : ^ — 10 
 
 Pray, do not mock me : 
 I am a very foolish fond old man, 
 Fourscore and upward, not an hour more nor less ; 
 And, to deal plainly, 
 I fear I am not in my perfect mind.^ 15 
 
 It is thus, by exquisite pertinence, melody, and 
 the implied power of writing with exuberance, if 
 need be, that beauty and truth become identical 
 in poetry, and that pleasure, or at the very worst, 
 a balm in our tears, is drawn out of pain. 20 
 
 It is a great and rare thing, and shows a lovely 
 imagination, when the poet can write a commen- 
 tary, as it were, of his own, on such sufficing pas- 
 sages of nature, and be thanked for the addition. 
 There is an instance of this kind in Warner, an 25 
 
 1 So Laing; Ellis and Hunt have 'bled.' 
 -l.ines 1611-1612, 1615-1617. 
 ^ Prologue 606-607. 
 
 ■•Adapted from Milton's // Penseroso 62: 'Most musical, 
 most melancholy.' 
 
 '" A'ing Lear J,. 7. 59-63.
 
 8 KINDS OF IMAGINATION. 
 
 old Elizabethan poet, than which I know nothing 
 sweeter in the world. He is speaking of Fair 
 Rosamond, and of a blow given her by Queen 
 Eleanor : — 
 
 5 With that she dasht her on the lippes, so dyed double red: 
 Hard ivas the heart that gave the blow, soft were those 
 lips that bled^ 
 
 r 
 
 There are different kinds and degrees of imagi- 
 nationJsome of them 'necessary to the formation 
 of every true poet, and all of them possessed by 
 the greatest. Perhaps they may be enumerated 
 as follows : -X- First, that which presents to the 
 mmd^any object or circumstance in every-day life ; 
 as whenVe imagine a man holding a sword, or 
 
 15 looking out oi^^a. window ; — Second, that which 
 presents real, but "not every-day circumstances ; 
 as' King Alfred tending the loaves,^ or Sir Philip 
 Sidney giving up the water to the dying soldier ; 
 — (third, that which combines character and 
 
 20 events directly imitated from real life, with imita- 
 tiVe realities of its own invention ^ as the probable 
 parts of the histories of Priam and Macbeth, or 
 what may be called natural fiction as distinguished 
 from supernatural ; — F'ourth, that which conjures 
 
 25 up things and events not to be found in nature ; 
 . as Homer's gods and Shakespeare's witches, 
 
 ^Albion's England %. 41. 53; ed. of 1597, p. 201. Modern 
 editions usually print as four lines, and so Hunt did; it is here 
 changed to conform to the original. 
 
 2 See I'auli's Alfred the Great (Bohn series), p. loi.
 
 KINDS OF IMAGINATION. 9 
 
 enchanted horses and spears,^ Ariosto's hippo- 
 griff,^ &c.; — Fifth,(that which, in order to illus- 
 trate or aggravate on^image, introduces another :) 
 sometimes in simile, as when Homer compares 
 Apollo descerming in his wrath at noon-day to the 5 
 coming of night-time\;^ sometimes in metaphor, 
 or simile comprised in a word, as in Milton's 
 'motes that people the sunbeams';^ sometimes 
 in concentrating into a word the main history of 
 any person or thing, past or even future, as in the 10 
 * starry Galileo ' ^ of Byron, and that ghastly fore- 
 gone conclusion of the epithet ' murdered ' applied 
 to the yet living victim in Keats's story from 
 Boccaccio, — 
 
 So the two brothers and their iii7irdc7'ed xa.2Si 15 
 
 Rode past ^ fair Florence ;'^ — 
 
 sometimes in the attribution of a certain repre- 
 sentative quality which makes one circumstance 
 stand for others, as in Milton's gray-fly winding 
 its ^ stilt ry horn,'^ which epithet contains the heat 20 
 of a summer's day ; — Sixth, (that which reverses 
 this process, and makes a variety of circumstances 
 take color from one, like nature seen with jaun- 
 diced or glad eyes, or unUer the influence of storm 
 
 1 See Chaucer, Gierke's Tale; Ariosto, Or I. Fur. 8. 17, etc.; 
 Spenser, /''. Q. 3. 3. 60, etc. ; and especially Warton, Hist. 
 Eng. Poetry 2. 33S - 34S, quoted in Skeat's edition of T/ie 
 Prioresses Tale, etc., pp. xxxiii-xli. 
 
 '^ vSee p. iS. •> Hunt, ' towards.' 
 
 3//. I. 47. 'Isabella st. 27. 
 
 4 // Pens. 8. 8 Lye, 28. 
 
 5 Gliilde Harold canto 4, st. 54.
 
 I O KINDS OF IMA GINA TION. 
 
 I 
 or sunshine ; as when in Lycidas, or the Greek 
 
 pastoral poets, the flowers and the flocks are made 
 
 to sympathize with a man's death ;i or, in the 
 
 Italian poet, the river flowing by the sleeping 
 
 5 Angelica seems talking of love — 
 
 Parea che 1' erba a lei fiorisse intorno, 
 E (f a7}ior ragionasse quclla 7'iva /- — 
 
 or in the voluptuous homage paid to the sleeping 
 Imogen by the very light in the chamber and the 
 
 10 reaction of her own beauty upon itself ;^ or in 
 
 the ' witch element ' of the tragedy of Macbeth 
 
 and the May-day night ■* of Faust ; — Seventh, and 
 
 I last, that which by a single expression, apparently 
 
 A of the vaguest kind, not only meets but surpasses 
 
 15 in its effect the cxtremest force of the most 
 particular description ; as in that exquisite pas- 
 sage of Coleridge's Christabel, where the unsus- 
 pecting object of the witch's malignity is bidden 
 to go to bed : — 
 
 20 Quoth Christabel, So let it be ! 
 
 And as the lady bade, did she. 
 .^ Her ;:;entle limbs did she undress, 
 
 A lid lay down in her loveliness : ^ — 
 
 a perfect verse surely, both for feeling and music. 
 25 The very smoothness and gentleness of the limbs 
 is in the series of the letter /'s. 
 
 ' Kuskin's 'pathetic fallacy'; A/otl. Pniutcrs, Part 4, Chap. 12. 
 2 Orl. fiiu. I. 3. 69; Hunt inserts after the quotation, '■Orlando 
 /««/7;//(7;77A^, canto iii.,'and writes 'le' for 'a lei.' 
 ^ Cyniheline 2. 2. 19 ff. 
 
 * Usually called the IVnlpnr^'is-Nii^tit's Draiin. 
 '' Near the end of Part (lie First. 
 
 i
 
 GRAND AND LOVELY IMAGLNATION. I I 
 
 I am aware of nothing of the kind surpassing 
 that most lovely inclusion of physical beauty in \ 
 moral, neither can I call to mind any instances of j 
 the imagination that turns accompaniments into 
 accessories, superior to those I have alluded to. 5 
 Of the class of comparison, one of the most 
 touching (many a tear must it have drawn from 
 parents and lovers) is in a stanza which has been 
 copied into the Friar of Orders Gray^ out of 
 Beaumont and Fletcher :^ — 10 
 
 Weep no more, lady, weep no more, 
 
 Thy sorrow is in vaine ; 
 For violets pluckt the sweetest showers 
 
 Will ne''er make grow againe. 
 
 And Shakespeare and Milton abound in the very 15 
 grandest ; such as Antony's likening his changing 
 fortunes to the cloud-rack ;^ Lear's appeal to the 
 old age of the heavens ;* Satan's appearance in 
 
 1 A cento composed by Bishop Percy out of fragments of the 
 old poets, and printed in the earlier editions of the Reliqiies. 
 
 - The stanza probably by Fletcher (Fleay thinks Field), who 
 may have been assisted in the composition of the play. The 
 Qtieen of Corinth, by others, or another, but hardly by Beaumont 
 (see Ward's Eng. Dram. Lit. 2. 220; Englische Shidien 7. 75; 9. 
 22; ID. 390; Fleay, Chronicle of the English Drama i. 206). 
 The stanza, which was not in the first edition, runs {Q. C. 3. 2. 
 
 ~^'' Weep no more, nor sigh, nor groan, 
 
 Sorrow calls no time that's gone; 
 Violets plucked, the sweetest rain 
 Makes not fresh nor grow again. 
 
 3 Aftt. and CI. 4. 14. 3- 14. 
 * King Lear 2. 4. 192 - 195.
 
 I 
 
 12 SHELLEY AND SHAKESPEARE. 
 
 the horizon, like a fleet 'hanging in the clouds ;^ 
 and the comparisons of him with the comet ^ and 
 the eclipse.^ Nor unworthy of this glorious 
 company, for its extraordinary combination of 
 5 delicacy and vastness, is that enchanting one of 
 Shelley's in the Adonais : — 
 
 Life, like a dome of many-colored glass, 
 Stains the white radiance of eternity.'' 
 
 I multiply these particulars in order to impress 
 10 upon the reader's mind the great importance of 
 imagination in all its phases, as a constituent part 
 of the highest poetic faculty. 
 
 The happiest instance I remember of imagina- 
 tive metaphor is Shakespeare's moonlight 'sleep- 
 15 ing' on a bank ;■'' but half his poetry may be said 
 to be made up of it, metaphor indeed being 
 the common coin of discourse. Of imaginary 
 creatures none, out of the pale of mythology and 
 the East, are equal, perhaps, in point of invention, 
 20 to Shakespeare's Ariel and Caliban ; though 
 poetry may grudge to prose the discovery of a 
 Winged Woman, especially such as she has been 
 described by her inventor in the story of Peter 
 Wilkins ;^ and in point of treatment, the Mam- 
 
 1 p. L. 2. 637. 
 
 "^ P. L. 2. 708-716. 
 
 ^ p. L. I. 576-579. 
 
 * .Stanza 52. See W. M. Rossetti's note in his edition. 
 
 ^ Merck. Ven. 5. i. 54. 
 
 ^ See the extract in Chambers' Cycl. Eui^. Lit. The novel is 
 by R. Paltock (pub. 1757); a facsimile reprint has been edited 
 by A. H. Hullen (London, 1884).
 
 SPENSEJi AND DANTE. 1 3 
 
 mon^ and Jealousy ^ of Spenser, some of the 
 monsters in Dante, particularly his Nimrod,^ his 
 interchangements of creatures into one another, 
 and (if I am not presumptuous in anticipating 
 what I think will be the verdict of posterity) the 5 
 Witch in Coleridgels-^hristabel, may rank even 
 with the creations of Shakespeare. It may be 
 doubted, indeed, whether Shakespeare had bile 
 and nightmare enough in him to have thought of 
 such detestable horrors as those of the interchang- 10 
 ing adversaries (now serpent, now man^), or even 
 of the huge, half-blockish enormity of Nimrod, — 
 in Scripture, the ' mighty hunter ' and builder of 
 the tower of Babel,^ — in Dante, a tower of a man 
 in his own person, standing with some of his 15 
 brother giants up to the middle in a pit in hell, 
 blowing a horn to which a thunder-clap is a 
 whisper, and hallooing after Dante and his guide 
 in the jargon of a lost tongue! The transfor- 
 mations are too odious to quote ; but of the 20 
 towering giant we cannot refuse ourselves the 
 'fearful joy' of a specimen. It was twilight, 
 Dante tells us, and he and his guide Virgil were 
 silently pacing through one of the dreariest regions 
 of hell, when the sound of a tremendous horn made 25 
 him turn all his attention to the spot from which 
 it came. He there discovered, through the dusk, 
 what seemed to be the towers of a city. Those 
 are no towers, said his guide ; they are giants, 
 
 ^ F. Q. Bk. 2, canto 7. A Inferno, canto 25. 
 
 4/' Q. 3. ID. 52-60. JGen. 10. 9, 10. 
 
 3 See pp. 14- 16.
 
 14 DANTE'S NIMROD. 
 
 standing up to the middle in one of these circular 
 pits : — 
 
 Come quando la nebbia si dissipa, 
 
 Lo si^uardo a poco a poco raffigura 
 5 Cio che cela il vapor, che T acre stipa; 
 
 Cosi forando 1' aura grossa e scura, 
 
 Piu e piu appressando in ver la sponda, 
 
 Fuggdmi errore, e giungdnii ^ paura: 
 Pero ch5 come in su la cerchia tonda 
 10 Montereggion di torri si corona; 
 
 Cosi la proda, clic il pozzo circonda, 
 Torreggiavan di mezza la persona 
 
 (ili orribili giganti, cui minaccia 
 
 Giove del cielo ancora quando tuona. 
 
 15 Ed io scorgeva gi:l d' alcun la faccia, 
 
 Le spalle, e il petto, e del ventre gran parte, 
 E per le coste giii ambo le braccia. 
 
 * * * * 
 
 La faccia sua mi parea lunga e grossa. 
 Come la pina di San Pietro a Roma; 
 2o E a sua proporzione eran 1' altre ossa. 
 
 * * * * 
 ' Rafel mai amech zabi almi ! ' 
 
 Comincio a gridar la fiera bocca, 
 
 Cui non si convenian piij dolci salmi. 
 E il duca mio ver lui: ' Anima sciocca ! 
 25 Tienti col corno, e con quel ti disfoga, 
 
 Quand' ira o altra passion ti tocca. 
 Cercati al collo, e troverai la soga 
 
 Che il tien legato, o anima confusa, 
 
 E vedi lui che il gran petto ti doga.' 
 30 Poi disse a me: ' Egli stesso s' accusa: 
 
 Questi h Nembrotto, per lo cui mal coto 
 
 Pure un linguaggio nel mondo non s' usa. 
 
 1 Scartazzini and some others prefer 'crescemi.'
 
 DANTE'S NIMROD. 15 
 
 Lasciamlo stare, e non parliamo a voto; 
 Ch& cosi h a lui ciascun linguasjgio, 
 Come il suo ad altrui, che a nullo e noto.' ^ 
 
 I looked again: and as the eye makes out, 
 
 By little and little, what the mist concealed, 5 
 
 In which, till clearing up, the sky was steeped; 
 
 So, looming through the gross and darksome air, 
 
 As we drew nigh, those mighty bulks grew plain. 
 
 And error quitted me, and terror joined: 
 
 For in like manner as all round its height lo 
 
 Montereggione crowns itself with towers. 
 
 So towered above the circuit of that pit, 
 
 Though but half out of it, and half within, 
 
 The horrible giants that fought Jove, and still 
 
 Are threatened when he thunders. As we neared 15 
 
 The foremost, I discerned his mighty face. 
 
 His shoulders, breast, and more than lialf his trunk, 
 
 With both the arms down hanging by the sides. 
 
 His face appeared to me, in length and breadth. 
 
 Huge as St. Peter's pinnacle at Rome, 20 
 
 And of a like proportion all his bones. 
 
 He opened, as we went, his dreadful mouth. 
 
 Fit for no sweeter psalmody; and shouted 
 
 After us, in the words of some strange tongue, 
 
 ' Rafel ma-ee amech zabee almee! — ' -5 
 
 ' Dull wretch!' my leader cried, 'keep to thine horn. 
 
 And so vent better whatsoever rage 
 
 Or other passion stuff thee. Feel thy throat 
 
 And find the chain upon thee, thou confusion! 
 
 Lo! what a hoop is clenched about thy gorge.' 3° 
 
 Then turning to myself, he said, ' His howl 
 
 Is its own mockery. This is Nimrod, he 
 
 Through whose ill thought it was that humankind 
 
 "^ Inf. 31. 34 -Si. Hunt inserts the reference after the 
 quotation.
 
 1 6 DANTE AND SHAKESPEARE. 
 
 Were tongue-confounded. Pass him, and say naught: 
 For as he speaketh language known of none, 
 So none can speak save jargon to himself.' ^ 
 
 Assuredly it could not have been easy to find a 
 fiction so uncouthly terrible as this in the hypo- 
 chondria of Hamlet. Even his father had 
 evidently seen no such ghost in the other world. 
 All his phantoms were in the world he had left. 
 Timon, Lear, Richard, Brutus, Prospero, Macbeth 
 himself, none of Shakespeare's men had, in fact, 
 any thought but of the earth they lived on, what- 
 ever supernatural fancy crossed them. The thing 
 fancied was .still a thing of this world, 'in its 
 habit as it lived,' ^ or no remoter acquaintance 
 
 15 than a witch or a fairy. Its lowest depths (unless 
 Dante suggested them) were the cellars under the 
 stase. Caliban himself is a cross-breed between 
 a witch and a clown. No offence to Shakespeare; 
 who was not bound to be the greatest of healthy 
 
 20 poets, and to have every morbid inspiration 
 besides. What he might have done, had he set 
 his wits to compete with Dante, I know not; all 
 I know is, that in the infernal line' he did nothing 
 like him; and it is not to be wi.shed he had. It 
 
 25 is far better that, as a higher, more universal, and 
 more beneficent variety of the genus Poet, he 
 .should have been the happier man he was, and 
 left us the plump cheeks on hi.s monument, 
 instead of the carking vi.sage of the great, but 
 
 30 over-serious, and comparatively one-sided Floren- 
 
 ' rf. the prose translation by Norton. ^ Jia^iil. 3. 4. 135. 
 
 /
 
 DANTE, SPENSER, CHAUCER. 1 7 
 
 tine. Even the imagination of Spenser, whom 
 we take to have been a ' nervous gentleman ' com- 
 pared with Shakespeare, was visited with no such 
 dreams as Dante. Or, if it was, he did not choose 
 to make himself thinner (as Dante says he did) 5 
 with dwelling upon them. He had twenty visions 
 of nymphs and bowers, to one of the mud of Tar- 
 tarus.^ Chaucer, for all he was 'a man of this 
 world ' as well as the poets' world, and as great, 
 perhaps a greater enemy of oppression than 10 
 Dante, besides being one of the profoundest mas- 
 ters of pathos that ever lived, had not the heart 
 to conclude the story of the famished father and 
 his children, as finished by the inexorable anti- 
 Pisan.2 But enough of Dante in this place. 15 
 Hobbes, in order to daunt the reader from object- 
 ing to his friend Davenant's want of invention, 
 says of these fabulous creations in general, in his 
 letter prefixed to the poem of Gondibert, that 
 ' impenetrable armors, enchanted castles, invul- 20 
 nerable bodies, iron men, flying horses, and a 
 thousand other such things, [which] ^ are easily 
 feigned by them that dare.' These are girds at 
 Spenser and Ariosto. But, with leave of Hobbes 
 (who translated Homer as if on purpose to show 25 
 what execrable verses could be written by a phi- 
 losopher), enchanted castles and flying horses are 
 not easily feigned, as Ariosto and Spenser feigned 
 them; and that just makes all the difference. 
 For proof, sec the accounts of Spenser's en- 30 
 
 1 Cf. j^. C- I- 5- 33- " ^"f- Zl- 1-90; Monk's Tale. 
 
 3 Hunt omits 'which.'
 
 1 8 THE IIIPFOGRIFF AND STEED OF BRASS. 
 
 chanted castle in Book the Third, Canto Twelfth, 
 of the Fairy Queen; and let the reader of Italian 
 open the Orlando Furioso at its first introduction 
 of the Hippogriffji where Bradamante, coming to 
 5 an inn, hears a great noise, and sees all the people 
 looking up at something in the air; upon which, 
 looking up herself, she sees a knight in shining 
 armor riding towards the sunset upon a creature 
 with variegated wings, and then dipping and dis- 
 10 appearing among the hills. ^ Chaucer's steed of 
 brass, that was 
 
 So horsly and so quik of ye,^ 
 
 is copied from the life. You might pat him and 
 feel his brazen muscles. Hobbes, in objecting to 
 
 15 what he thought childish, made a childish mistake. 
 His criticism is just such as a boy might pique 
 himself upon, who was educated on mechanical 
 principles, and thought he had outgrown his 
 Goody Two-shoes. With a wonderful dimness of 
 
 20 discernment in poetic matters, considering his 
 acuteness in others, he fancies he has settled the 
 question by pronouncing such creations ' impos- 
 sible ! ' To the brazier they are impossible, no 
 
 1 4. 4. Hunt introduces the reference, parenthetically, into 
 the text, but wrongly, as 3. 4. 
 
 2 The prototype of the Ilippogriff is I'egasus, for which see 
 Hawthorne's Ta7iglewood Tales, The Chimaera. The earliest 
 mention of Pegasus is in Ilesiod. Chaucer recognizes the like- 
 ness of his horse of brass to Pegasus {Clerk'' s 7 ale 207-208): 
 
 And seyden, it was lyk the Pegasee, 
 The hors that hadde winges for to flee. 
 ' S(j litre's Talc 194.
 
 PYTHON AND THE ARIELS. 1 9 
 
 doubt; but not to the poet. Their possibiHty, if 
 the poet wills it, is to be conceded; the problem 
 is, the creature being given, how to square its 
 actions with probability, according to the nature 
 assumed of it. Hobbes did not see that the skill 5 
 and beauty of these fictions lay in bringing them 
 within those very regions of truth and likelihood 
 in which he thought they could not exist. Hence 
 the serpent Python of Chaucer, 
 
 Slepyiige agayn ^ the soniie upon a day^^ 10 
 
 when Apollo slew him. Hence the chariot-draw- 
 ing dolphins 3 of Spenser, softly swimming along 
 the shore lest they should hurt themselves against 
 the stones and gravel. Hence Shakespeare's 
 Ariel, living under blossoms, and riding at even- 15 
 ing on the bat; and his domestic namesake* in 
 the Rape of the Lock (the imagination of the 
 drawing-room) saving a lady's petticoat from the 
 coffee with his plumes, and directing atoms of 
 snuff into a coxcomb's nose. In the Orlando 20 
 Furioso^ is a wild story of a cannibal necro- 
 mancer, who laughs at being cut to pieces, com- 
 ing together again like quicksilver, and picking up 
 his head when it is cut off, sometimes by the 
 hair, sometimes by the nose! This, which would 25 
 be purely childish and ridiculous in the hands of 
 an inferior poet, becomes interesting, nay grand, 
 
 1 Hunt, ' against.' 
 
 2 Manciple's Tale 6. 
 
 3 F. Q. 3. 4- 33' 34- 
 
 * Not he, but his legions; see 3. 115; 5. 83. 
 
 515. 65. Hunt introduces the reference in parenthesis.
 
 +- 
 
 20 IMAGINATION IN ARIOSTO. 
 
 in Ariosto's, from the beauties of his style, and its 
 conditional truth to nature. The monster has a 
 fated hair on his head — a single hair^ — which 
 must be taken from it before he can be killed. 
 5 Decapitation itself is of no consequence, without 
 that proviso. The Paladin Astolfo, who has 
 fought this phenomenon on horseback, and suc- 
 ceeded in getting the head and galloping off with 
 it, is therefore still at a loss what to be at. How 
 
 lo is he to discover such a needle in such a bottle of 
 hay.-* The trunk is spurring after him to recover 
 it, and he seeks for some evidence of the hair in 
 vain. At length he bethinks him of scalping the 
 head. He does so; and the moment the opera- 
 
 15 tion arrives at the place of the hair, the face of the 
 head becomes pale, the eyes turn in their sockets, 
 and the lifeless pursuer tumbles from his horse: 
 
 Si fece il viso allor pallido e brutto, 
 Travolse gli occhi, e dimostro all' occaso 
 20 Per manifesti segni esser condutto; 
 
 E '1 busto che seguia troncato al collo, 
 D: sella cadde, e d\h V ultimo crollo.^ 
 
 Then grew the visage pale, and deadly wet, 
 The eyes turned in their sockets, drearily; 
 25 And all things show'd the villain's sun was set. 
 
 His trunk that was in chase, fell from its horse, 
 And, giving the la.st shudder, was a corse. 
 
 It is thus, and thus only, by making Nature his 
 companion wherever he goes, even in the most 
 
 * Apparently a reminiscence of Virgil, Geori^. 1.404 ff.; Ovid, 
 Metamorph. 8. i ff.; or the pseudo-Virgiiian Ciris. 
 2 Or I. Fur. 15. 87.
 
 THE SUPERNATURAL IN IMAGINATION. 21 
 
 supernatural region, that_J:he poet, in the words / 
 of a very "Instructive phrase, takes the world along 
 with him. It is true, he must not (as the Plato- 
 nists would say) humanize weakly or mistakenly 
 in that region ; otherwise he runs the chance of 5 
 forgetting to be true to the supernatural itself, 
 and so betraying a want of imagination from that 
 quarter. His nymphs will have no taste of their 
 woods and waters; his gods and goddesses be 
 only so many fair or frowning ladies and gentle- 10 
 men, such as we see in ordinary joaintings; he will 
 be in no danger of having his angels likened to a 
 sort of wild-fowl, as Rembrandt has made them in 
 his Jacob's Dream. His Bacchuses will never 
 remind us, like Titian's, of the force and fury, as 15 
 well as of the graces of wine. His Jupiter will 
 reduce no females to ashes; his fairies be nothing 
 fantastical; his gnomes, not 'of the earth, 
 earthy.' ^ And this again will be wanting to 
 Nature; for it will be wanting to the super- 20 
 natural, as Nature would have made it, working in 
 a supernatural direction. Nevertheless, the poet, 
 even for imagination's sake, must not become a 
 bigot to imaginative truth, dragging it down into 
 the region of the mechanical and the limited, and 20 
 losing sight of its paramount privilege, which is 
 to make beauty, in a human sense, the lady and 
 queen of the universe. He would gain nothing 
 by making his ocean-nymphs mere fishy creatures, 
 upon the plea that such only could live in the 
 
 ^ I Cor. 15. 47.
 
 22 BEAUTY MUST BE PARAMOUNT. 
 
 water; his wood-nymphs with faces of knotted 
 oak; his angels without breath and song, because 
 no lungs could exist between the earth's atmos- 
 phere and the empyrean. The Grecian tendency 
 5 in this respect is safer than the Gothic; nay, more 
 imaginative; for it enables us to imagine beyond 
 imagination, and to bring all things healthily 
 round to their only present final ground of sym- 
 pathy — the human. When we go to heaven, 
 [.a«-^we may idealize in a superhuman mode, and have 
 altogether different notions of the beautiful; but 
 till then we must be content with the loveliest 
 capabilities of earth. The sea-nymphs of Greece 
 were still beautiful women, though they lived in the 
 
 15 water. The gills and fins of the ocean's natural 
 inhabitants were confined to their lowest semi- 
 human attendants; or if Triton himself was not 
 quite human, it was because he represented the 
 fiercer part of the vitality of the seas, as they did 
 
 20 the fairer. 
 
 To conclude this part of my subject, I will 
 quote from the greatest of all narrative writers 
 two passages; — one .e2cemj3lifying the imagina- 
 tiofuwhich brings supernatural _thin5S to bear on 
 
 25 earthly, without confounding them ; the other yj, 
 that which paints events and circumstances after 
 real^fe. The first is where Achilles, who has 
 long absented himself from the conflict between 
 his countrymen and the Trojans, has had a mes- 
 
 30 sage from heaven bidding him reappear in the 
 enemy's sight, standing outside the camp-wall
 
 ACHILLES TILE GLORIOUS. 23 
 
 upon the trench, but doing nothing more; that 
 is to say, taking no part in the fight. lie is 
 simply to be seen. The two armies down by 
 the sea-side are contending which shall possess 
 the body of Patroclus; and the mere sight of the 5 
 dreadful Grecian chief — supernaturally indeed 
 impressed upon them, in order that nothing may 
 be wanting to the full effect of his courage and 
 conduct upon courageous men — is to determine 
 the question. We are to imagine a slope of 10 
 ground towards the sea, in order to elevate the 
 trench; the camp is solitary; the battle ('a dread- 
 ful roar of men,' as Homer calls it) is raging on 
 the sea-shore; and the goddess Iris has just de- 
 livered her message and disappeared: — 15 
 
 AvTap A^iAAcL'S oJpTO SllcJuXo^' dfxcjii 8' 'AOr'jvr/ 
 fi/u,ots l(f>6ifJiOL(ri /3aA alytha Ovcrcravoccrcrav • 
 AjLK^t be ol K€(f)aXrj v€<^os €(rT€(f>€ 8ia Otamiv 
 
 Xpvcreoi', eK 8 avrov Sate <fi\6ya Tra/x^avoojcav. 
 lis o oTC KaTTvos iwv e^ acrreos ataep iKyruL 20 
 
 Tr;A.o^ev €K vr/crov, rrjv Srj'ioL uyu,<^t/i,a;^ajvrat, 
 
 Ot re TravrjixeptoL cnvy€p<2 Kpivovrat 'Aprf'i 
 Aoreos eK crcfteTepov • afxa 8 ^eXtw KaraSvvTi 
 
 Hvpaot re ^XeyeOovcvLV eTTrjTpLp.0L, vij/oae 8' avyr] 
 
 TiyveTai dicrcrovaa, TrepiKTioveacnv I8ea0at, 25 
 
 Ai Key TTto? crvv vrjvrrlv a.prj(; dXKrrjpe'i LKwvraL' 
 fls air A)^i\Xrjo'i Ke(f)aXrj<; creAas alOep' LKavev. 
 
 2,Trj o eiTL raffipov Vnv airo Tei^eo-;, ovS' es 'Abators 
 M.t(TyeTo- jxrjTpo'i yap TrvKivrjv WTrt^er' e<^eTp.iqv. 
 Ev^a (TTcis y]V(T- airaTepOe 8e IlaAAa? 'AO-qvrj 30 
 
 <I>^eytaT • tlrap Tpuyeaa-tv ev acnrerov (Spae KvSoifjiov.
 
 24 THR KICnTFRNTIT ILIAD. 
 
 12s OT apLQyAr) (piovrj, ore t la^e (raATriyc 
 
 AcTTv TTCpLTrXo/xevutv orjLWV VTTo Ovixopa'icrTiwv ' 
 'fls TOT apLt,rj\.-q (jxDvrj yej/CT AiaKtSao. 
 01 8 ws ouv ai'oi' oTTu ^oAkcov AtaKt'Sao, 
 5 Ilticriv opivOrj Ovp.o<; • drap KaAAtVpi^es ittttoi 
 
 Ai// "X^u TpoTTCOv • ocTcrovTo yap oAyea Ovp.w. 
 
 HvLO^OL o eKTrXrjyev, iirel iSov aKap-aTov irvp 
 Aeivov vir\p Ke(/)aA^s fJieya6vp,ov Hr]Xetwvo<; 
 AaLop.evov to Se Sate ^ea yXavKwirfi Ad-^vrj' 
 10 Tpi? /ACi/ VTrep rd^pov p,€ydX la^e Sios A^tXXevSj 
 Tpts o iKVKr'iOrjcrav Tpioes kAcitoi' t iTTLKOvpoi. 
 
 "EvOa Bk KOL TOT dXoVTO 8uoj8£Ka ^WTCS (XptCTTOl 
 
 Ap.<f>L (r<fio'L<i 6)(^iea(TL koL eyp^eo^iv.^ 
 
 But up Achilles rose, the loved of heaven; 
 
 13 And Pallas on his mighty shoulders cast 
 
 The shield of Jove; and round about his head 
 
 She put the glory of a golden mist, 
 
 P>om which there burnt a fiery-Haming liglit. 
 
 And as, when smoke goes heavenward from a town, 
 
 20 In some far island which its foes besiege, 
 Who all day long with dreadful martialness 
 Have poured from their own town; soon as the sun 
 Has set, thick lifted fires are visible. 
 Which, rushing upward, make a light in the sky, 
 
 25 And let the neighbors know, who may perhaps 
 Bring help across the sea; so from the head 
 Of great Achilles went up an effulgence. 
 
 Upon the trench he stood, without the wall, 
 But mixed not with the Greeks, for he revered 
 30 His mother's word; and so, thus standing there, 
 He shouted; and Minerva, to his shout. 
 Added a dreadful cry; and there arose 
 Among the Trojans an unspeakable tumult. 
 
 > //. 18. 203-231. Hunt introduces the reference into the text.
 
 PRIAM AND ACHILLES. 2$ 
 
 And as the clear voice of a trumpet, blown 
 
 Against the town by spirit-withering foes, 
 
 So sprang the clear voice of ^acides. 
 
 And when they heard the l)razen cry, their hearts 
 
 All leaped within them; and the jMoucl-maned horses 5 
 
 Ran with the chariots round, for they foresaw 
 
 Calamity; and the charioteers were smitten, 
 
 When they beheld the ever-active fire 
 
 Upon the dreadful head of tlie great-minded one 
 
 Burning; for bright-eyed Pallas made it burn. 10 
 
 Thrice o'er the trench divine Achilles shouted; 
 
 And thrice the Trojans and their great allies 
 
 Rolled back; and twelve of all their noblest men 
 
 Then perished, crushed by their own arms and chariots. 
 
 Of course there is no further question about the 15 
 body of Patrockis. It is drawn out of the press, 
 and received by the awful hero with tears. 
 
 The other passage is where Priam, kneeHng 
 before Achilles, and imploring him to give up the 
 dead body of Hector, reminds him of his own 20 
 father; who, whatever (says the poor old king) 
 may be his troubles with his enemies, has the 
 blessing of knowing that his son is still alive, and 
 may daily hope to see him return. Achilles, in 
 accordance with the strength and noble honesty 25 
 of the passions in those times, weeps aloud him- 
 self at this appeal, feeling, says Homer, ' desire ' 
 for his father in his very 'limbs.' ^ He joins in 
 grief for the venerable sufferer, and can no longer 
 withstand the look of his 'gray head and his gray 30 
 chill.' Observe the exquisite introduction of this 
 last word. It paints the touching fact of the 
 chin's being imploringly thrown upward by the 
 
 ^ But this line (514) is generally regarded as spurious.
 
 26 THE TIVEXTY-FOUKTII J LI AD. 
 
 kneeling old man, and the very motion of his 
 beard as he speaks: — 
 
 Os apa <f>(Di'r]aa<; aTrefSr] irpo'i fiaKpov "OXv/xTrov 
 'E/3/xeias' lI/3tayu.os 8' e^ tTTTrtov uAto p^a/Aa^e, 
 5 loaioi' oe kut atit/i AtTrej/ • o oe fj.ifx.v(.v epvKoiv 
 
 Ittttous rjixL6vov<; re* ye'pcov 8 t^i^s Ktev otKov, 
 TjJ^ p Ai^iAevs t^£crK€, 8it'<^tAos • cv 8e /u,tv uvtov 
 Eup , €Tapoi 8 dirdvcvOe KaduaTO' tw 8e 8i!' otw 
 
 HpOJS AvTO/X€OU)V T£. Kat "AAKip.OS O^OS "AprjOSt 
 
 10 rTotTTKUOV TrapeovTC ve'ov 8 uTreAT^yev €8aj8^Si 
 Ecr^ojj' Kai TTtVojv. €Ti Kai TrapeKCLTO rpajre^a * 
 Toiic 8 eAu^* (.l(T(.X()u)v WpCap.o'i ixeyu<;, d.y)^L 8 ap(<. ffxas, 
 XepfTtv A^lXXtjo'S Xdfte yovvara, Kat kwc ^eipas 
 Aetms, dv8po<^ovovs< ai' ot TroAeas ktuvov utus. 
 '5 i/s o OT ttv uvop arr/ irvKivrj Aaprj, oo"T , €vt irarprf 
 <I>a)Ta KaTuKTCtVas. oAAov i^LK€TO orjpiov, 
 Av8po5 €9 a<^vetoi;, 6dp.(io<; 8' e^et europoojvrus * 
 fis Ai^iAews 6a.fxfi-q(T(.v, Ihlav llpta/xov OeoeiSea • 
 @dfjifir)(Tav 8e Kat oAAot, €s oAAt/Aous 8e tSovTO. 
 2o Tov Kat AttTcrop-cvos Ilpta/jtos Trpos p.v6ov eetirev- 
 
 M.vrj(Tai Trarpos croto, ^eots 67rtetKeA' 'A;!^tAA£v, 
 Tv^AtKOv, wcnrep iywv. oAooj etti yv/paos ovo(S. 
 Kat p,ti/ TTOV KEtvov Treptvaterat dp-(f>L<; tovres 
 Tctpouo" , ovSc Tt5 €o-Ttv, dp^v Kat Aotyov ap-vi/ai • 
 
 25 AAA 7} Tot KtTvo? yc, aWtv ^wovtos dKovwv, 
 Xat'ptt T iv Ovfxw, cTTi T cArreTat rjputTa irdvTa 
 'OipardaL <f>LXov vlov, uTrb TpotrjOev lovra • 
 A wrap cyw TravaTTOT/xos, CTrct tskov vias dpifrTOvs 
 TpOLfj ev cvpCLq, tC)v 8 ou Ttvd ^rjiJ-i X(.XtL<^uai. 
 
 30 IlevTT/KOVTtt /i.ot rjfTuv, OT rjXvOov vies Ap^atwv * 
 Ei/vcttKatScKa p.£v p.01 lrj<; ck vtjSvos rytrav, 
 Tous 8 dAAors /xot Itlktov evt /xeydpoLcn yvv(UK€<;. 
 Twv p,€i/ TToAAwv Oovpo<; "Apvy? iiTTo yowaT cAurrci/ • 
 
 "O? Se p,Ot o7o9 €7;i'. CLpVTO 8c d(TTU Kttt aUTOUSj
 
 THE CRIEF OE PRIAM. 2"] 
 
 Tov (TV 7rp(j)rjV ktclvu^, afx-vvofxevov vrepi Trarpr^s, 
 "EKTopa* TOV vvv etve;)( iKavo) i/^as A^iaS>i', 
 Avcro/xevos irapa creto, (f>epo} o aTrepeurt airoiva. 
 'AAA' alSeio Oeov'i, A^^tAeS, avTov T ikcrjcrov., 
 Mvrjadp.evo'i (xov Trarpos' eyw 8 eAeet vox epos Trep, 5 
 
 "^tXyJV 8', Ot' OVTTO) TLS (.TVL')(y6vLO'i (3pOT6<i oAAoS, 
 
 'AvSpos TraLSo(f>6voLO ttotl crrofjia X^'P upeyeaduL. 
 
 ''fls cjxxTO' Tw 8 apa Trurpos !></> t'/Atpov (npat yooio, 
 'Ai/'ap.evos 8 apa '^eipo'i, aTrwaaro tjku yepovra. 
 Tw 8e p,V7yo"ap.eVw, o pev "EKTopos dv8poc/)ovoio, lo 
 
 KAai' dStm, wpoTrdpciOe 7ro8wv A^tA^os iXva$€L<; ' 
 AvTap 'A^tAAeus KAatcf eov Trarep , ciAAore 8 avre 
 IlttTpOKAov • Toiv 8e arova^r] Kara 8wpaT opwpei. 
 Avrap, lira, pa yooio T^Tap-rrero 8tos AxtAAeiis, 
 [Kat oi (XTTo TrpaTTLOuyv rjXO 'Lp.€po<i, r/o (xtto yviwv,] 15 
 
 AvTtK oLTTo Opovov ojpTo, yipovTa 8e ^^tpos avcaTT], 
 OtKTet'pwv TToAioi' T£ KOLpr], TToAiov Tc yeVetov.^ 
 
 So saying, Mercury vanished up to heaven; 
 
 And Priam then alighted from his chariot, 
 
 Leaving Id^us with it, who remained 20 
 
 Holding the mules and horses; and the old man 
 
 Went straight indoors, where the beloved of Jove 
 
 Achilles sat, and found him. In the room 
 
 Were others, but apart; and two alone. 
 
 The hero Automedon, and Alcimus, 25 
 
 A branch of Mars, stood by him. They had been 
 
 At meals, and had not yet removed the board. 
 
 Great Priam came, without their seeing him, 
 
 And kneeling down, he clasped Achilles' knees. 
 
 And kissed those terrible, homicidal hands, 3° 
 
 Which had deprived him of so many sons. 
 
 And as a man who is pressed heavily 
 
 For having slain another, flies away 
 
 To foreign lands, and comes into the house 
 
 1 //. 24. 468-516. As in 24, note.
 
 28 PRIAxM AND ACHILLES. 
 
 Of some great man, and is beheld with wonder, 
 
 So did Achilles wonder to see Priam; 
 
 And the rest wondered, looking at each other. 
 
 But Priam, praying to him, spoke these words: ^ 
 5 ' God-like Achilles, think of thine own father! 
 
 To the same age have we both come, the same 
 
 Weak pass; and though tlie neighboring chiefs may vex 
 
 Him also, and his borders find no help. 
 
 Yet when he hears that thou art still alive, 
 lo He gladdens inwardlv, and daily hopes 
 
 To see liis dear son coming back from Troy. 
 
 But I, bereaved old Priam! I had once 
 
 Brave sons in Troy, and now I cannot say 
 
 That one is left me. Fifty children liad I, 
 :5 When the Greeks came, nineteen were of one womb; 
 
 The rest my women bore me in my house. 
 
 The knees of many of these fierce Mars has loosened; 
 
 And he who had no peer, Troy's prop and theirs. 
 
 Him hast thou killed now, fighting for his country, 
 20 Hector; and for his sake am I come here 
 
 To ransom him, bringing a countless ransom. 
 
 But thou, Achilles, fear the gods, and think 
 
 Of thine own father, and have mercy on me: 
 
 For I am much more wretched, and have borne 
 25 What never mortal bore, I think, on earth, 
 
 To lift unto my lips the hand of him 
 
 Who slew my boys.' 
 
 He ceased; and there arose 
 Sharp longing in Achilles for his father; 
 
 30 And taking Priam by the hand, he gently 
 J^ut him away; for both shed tears to think 
 Of other times; the one, most bitter ones 
 For Hector, and with wilful wretchedness 
 Lay right before Achilles: and the other, 
 
 35 For his own father now, and now his friend. 
 
 And the whole house might hear them as they moaned.
 
 THE GENIUS FOR NARRATION. 29 
 
 But when divine Achilles had refreshed 
 
 His soul with tears, and sharp desire had left 
 
 His heart and limbs, he got up from his throne, 
 
 And raised the old man by the hand, and took 
 
 Pity on his gray head and his gray chin. 5 
 
 O lovely and immortal privilege of genius ! that 
 can stretch its hand out of the wastes of time, 
 thousands of years back, and touch our eyelids 
 with tears. In these passages there is not a word 
 which a man of the most matter-of-fact understand- 10 
 ing might not have written, if lie had thought o/~~\ 
 it. But in poetry, feeling and imagination are 
 necessary to the perception and presentation even 
 of patters of fact. They, and they only, see what 
 is proper to be told, and what to be kept back; 15 
 what is pertinent, affecting, and essential. With- 
 out feeling, there is a want of delicacy and dis- 
 tinction; without imagination there is no true 
 embodiment. In poets, even good of their kind, 
 but without a genius for narration, the action 20 
 would have been encumbered or diverted with in- 
 genious mistakes. The over-contemplative would 
 have given us too many remarks; the over-lyrical, 
 a style too much carried away; the over-fanciful, 
 conceits and too many similes; the unimagina- 25 
 five, the facts without the feeling, and not even ^ 
 those. We should have been told nothing of 
 the 'gray chin,' of the house hearing them as 
 they moaned, or of Achilles gently putting the 
 old man aside ; much less of that yearning for his 30 
 father, which made the hero tremble in every limb. 
 
 /
 
 30 CONVENTIONAL METAPHOR. 
 
 Writers without tlic greatest passion and power 
 do not feel in this way, nor are capable of express- 
 ing the feeling; though there is enough sensi- 
 bility and imagination all over the world to enable 
 
 5 mankind to be moved by it, when the poet strikes 
 his truth into their hearts. 
 
 P The reverse oJ_imagination is exhibited in pure 
 
 J, absence of ideas, in commonplaces, and, above 
 all, in conventional jnetajohor, or such images and 
 
 lo their phraseology as have become the common 
 ■property of discourse and writing. Addison's 
 Cato is full of them : — 
 
 Passion unpitied and successless love 
 Plant daggers in viy hearth 
 
 15 I've sounded my Numidians, man by man, 
 
 And find 'em 7-ipe for a revolt.'^ 
 
 The virtuous Marcia towers above her sex.^ 
 
 Of the .same kind is his 'courting the yoke' — 
 ' distracting my very soul ' * — ' calling up all ' 
 
 20 one's ' father ' in one's soul — * working every 
 nerve' — 'copying a bright example;'^ in short 
 the whole play, relieved now and then with a 
 smart sentence or turn of words. The following 
 is a pregnant example of plagiarism and weak 
 
 25 writing. It is from another tragedy of Addison's 
 time, — the Mariamne of Fenton : — 
 
 1 I. I. ITunt has ' breast ' for 'heart.' ^ i- 3- 
 
 81.4. ^ Hunt writes 'heart.' ^ All from i. i.
 
 FAXCY AND IMAGINATION. 3 I 
 
 Mariamne, with superior charms, 
 Triumphs o'er reason; in her look she bears 
 A paradise of ever-blooming sweets; 
 Fair as the first idea beauty prints 
 In the young lover's soul; a winning grace 5 
 
 Guides every gesture, and obsequious love 
 Attends on all her steps. 
 
 ' Triumphing o'er reason ' is an old acquaintance 
 of everybody's. ' Paradise in her look ' is from the 
 Italian poets through Dryden. ' Fair as the first 10 
 idea,' &c., is from Milton,^ spoilt; 'winning grace' 
 and ' steps ' from Milton 2 and Tibullus,^ both 
 spoilt. Whenever beauties are stolen by such a 
 writer, they are sure to be spoilt; just as when 
 a great writer borrows, he improves. 15 
 
 To come now to Fancy, — she is a younger"! ^^t==:^ 
 sister of Imagination, without the other's weight 
 of' thought and feeling. Imagination indeed, 
 purely so called, is all feeling; the feeling of the 
 subtlest and most affecting analogies ; the percep- 20 
 tion of sympathies in the natures of things, or 
 in their popular attributes. Fancy is a sporting 
 with their resemblance, real or supposed, and with 
 airy and fantastical creations : — -» 
 
 Rouse yourself; and the weak wanton Cupid 25 
 
 Shall from your neck unloose his amorous fold, 
 And, like a dew-drop from the lion's mane, 
 Be shook to air^ 
 
 1 P. L. 7. 557. 
 
 2 p. L. 8. 61, 489. 
 
 3 Tihullns 4. 2. 7-8. 
 * Troilus and Cressida 3. 3. 222-225. As in 24, note.
 
 32 FANCY AND IMAGINATION. 
 
 J~That is imagination; — the strong mind sympa- 
 thizing with the strong beast, and the weak love 
 identified with the weak dew-drop. 
 
 And I, forsooth, in love! I, that have been love's whip; 
 5 A very beadle to a Iminoroiis sigh ; 
 
 A domineering pedant o'er the boy; 
 
 « # * * * * 1 
 This whimpled, whining, purblind, wayward boy; 
 This senior-junior, giant-dwarf, Dan Cupid; 
 Regent of love-rimes., lord of folded anus., 
 10 The anointed sovereign of sighs and groans, &c.^ 
 
 ^ 
 
 ■f 
 
 That is fancy; — a.j:ambmatioii_of irnaj^es_not in 
 their nature^ cojinected, or3i'^«tr^'*t-_tog-ether by 
 the feeling, but by the will and pleasure; and 
 having just enough hold of analogy to betray it 
 15^ into the hands of its smiling subjector. 
 
 Silent icicles 
 Quietly shinittg to the cpiiet moon.^ 
 
 That, again, is imagination — analogical sympathy; 
 and exquisite of its kind it is. 
 
 20 You are now sailed into the north of my lady''s opinion; 
 where you will hang like an icicle on a Dutchman'' s beard., 
 unless you do redeem it by some laudable attempt.* 
 
 And that is fancy; — one image capriciously sug- 
 gested by another, and but half connected with 
 25 the subject of discourse; nay, half opposed to 
 
 1 One line omitted, Inil no break indicated by Hunt. 
 
 - Lm)t:\<: Labor'' s Lost T^. i. 176-184. A.s in 24, note. Hunt 
 introduces the quotation with an ' Oh! ' which i.s not in Shakes- 
 peare. 
 
 8 Coleridge's Frost at Midnight. As in 24, note. 
 
 * Twclftk Night 3. 2. 28-31. As in 24, note.
 
 FAA'CV AND IMAGINATION. 33 
 
 it; for in the gaiety of the speaker's animal V 
 spirits, the ' Dutchman's beard ' is made to repre- 
 sent the lady! 
 
 Imagination belongs to Tragedy, or the serious 
 muse; Fancy to the comic. Macbeth, Lear, 5 
 Paradise Lost, the poem of Dante, are full of 
 imagination : the Midsummer Night'sJ^ream and 
 the Rape of the Lock, of fancy { Romeo and 
 Juliet, the Tempest, the Fairy Ou^cn, and the 
 Orlando Furioso, of both. \ The terms were 10 
 formerly identical, or used as such ; and neither 
 is the best that might be found. The term 
 Imagination is too confined; often too material. 
 It presents too invariably the idea of a solid 
 body — of 'images' in the sense of the plaster- 15 
 cast cry about the streets. Fancy, on the other 
 hand, while it means nothing but a spiritual -Ns^ 
 image or apparition {(fyavTaajJia, appearance, 
 pJiantoni), has rarely that freedom from visibility 
 which is one of the highest privileges of imagina- 20 
 tion. Viola, in Twelfth Night, speaking of some 
 beautiful music, says: — 
 
 It gives a very echo to the seat 
 Where Love is throned. ^ 
 
 In this charming thought, fancy and imagination 25 
 are combined; yet the fancy, the assumption of 
 Love's sitting on a throne, is the image of a solid 
 body; while the imagination, the sense of sym- 
 pathy between the passion of love and impas- 
 sioned music, presents us no image at all. Some 30 
 
 ^ 2. 4. 21-22.
 
 34 IMAGIXATION AND MELANCHOLY. 
 
 I 
 
 new term is wanting to express the more spiritual 
 sympathies of what is called Imagination. 
 y One of the teachers of Imagination is Melan- 
 choly; and like Melancholy, as Albert Diirer has 
 5 painted her, she looks ou t among the stars, and 
 is busied with spiritual affinities a nd the mysteries 
 of the un iypr'^p Fa ncy turns her sister's wizard 
 instruments^ to to ys. i.She takes a telescope in 
 hei- IkiihI, ami })uts a mimic star on her forehead, 
 
 10 a nd sallies forth as an emblem of astronomy. 
 Her t endency is to the childlike and sportive. 
 She cliases biitleiflies, while her sister takes 
 flight with angels. She is the genius of fairies, 
 of gallantries, of fashions; of whatever is quaint 
 
 15 and light, showy and capricious; of the poetical 
 part of wit. She adds wings and feelings to the 
 images of wit; and delights as much to people 
 nature with smiling ideal sympathies, as wit does 
 to bring antipathies together, and make them 
 
 20 strike light on absurdity. Fancy, however, is not 
 incapable of sympathy with Imagination. She is 
 often found in her company; always, in the case 
 of the greatest poets; often in that of less, though 
 with them she is the greater favorite. Spenser 
 
 25 has great imagination and fancy too, but more of 
 the latter; Milton both also, the very greatest, 
 but with imagination predominant; Chaucer the 
 strongest imagination of real life, beyond any 
 writers but Homer, Dante, and ShakesiDcarc, and 
 '30 in comic painting inferior to none;) Pope has 
 hardly any imagmation, but he has a great deal
 
 FANCY IN SIIAJkESPEARE. 35 
 
 of -fancy ; Coleridge little fancy, but imagination ^ 
 exquisite. Shakespeare alone, of all poets that 
 ever lived, enjoyed the regard of both in equal 
 perfection. A whole fairy poem of his writing 
 will be found in the present volume.^ See also 5 
 his famous description of Queen Mab and her 
 equipage, in Romeo and Juliet i^ — 
 
 Her wagon-spokes made of long spinners' legs, 
 
 The cover of the wings of grasshoppers, 
 
 The 3 traces of the smallest spider's web, 10 
 
 The collars of the moonshine's watery beams, &c. 
 
 That is Fancy, in its playful creativeness. As a 
 
 small but pretty rival specimen, less known, take 
 
 the description of a fairy palace from Drayton's 
 
 Nymphidia : — 15 
 
 This palace standeth in the air, 
 By necromancy placed there, 
 That it no tempests ^ needs to fear, 
 
 Which way soe'er it blow it: 
 And somewhat southward tow'rd the noon, 20 
 
 Whence lies a way up to tlie moon. 
 And thence the Fairy can as soon 
 
 Pass to the earth below it. 
 The walls of spiders' legs are made. 
 Well mortised and finely laid; 25 
 
 He was the master of his trade. 
 
 It curiously that builded: 
 
 1 Meaning T/ie Qiianrl of Obcron and Titania, which Hunt 
 extracts from the Midsiinivier Nigkfs Dream, and prints in the 
 volume to which this essay serves as introduction. 
 
 ■^ I. 4. 59-62. 
 
 3 In this and the following line Hunt prints ' Her.' 'The' 
 is Pope's emendation. 
 
 * Hunt, ' tempest.'
 
 36 FANCY IN DRAYTON. 
 
 The -windows of the eyes of cats : 
 (because they see best at night,) 
 
 And for the roof, instead of slats, 
 Is covered with the skins of bats 
 5 With moonshine that are gilded. 
 
 Here also is a fairy bed, very dehcate, from the 
 same poet's Muse's Elysium :^^ — 
 
 Of leaves of roses, white and red. 
 
 Shall be the covering of her - bed; 
 lo The curtains, vallens, tester all 
 
 Shall be the flower imperial; 
 
 And for the fringe, it all along 
 
 With azure harebells shall be hung. 
 
 Of lilies shall the pillows be, 
 IS With down stuft of the butterfly. 
 
 Of fancy, so full of gusto as to border on 
 imagination. Sir John Suckling, in his Ballad 
 upon ^ a Wedding, has given some of the most 
 playful and charming specimens in the language. 
 20 They glance like twinkles of the eye, or cherries 
 bedewed : — 
 
 Her feet beneath her petticoat 
 Like little mice stole in and out. 
 As if they feared the light; 
 i^ But oh! she dances such a way! 
 
 A^o sun upoti an Easter Day 
 Is half so fine a sight. 
 
 It is very daring, and has a sort of playful 
 
 grandeur, to compare a lady's dancing with the 
 
 30 sun. Hut as the sun has it all to himself in 
 
 1 Nymphal 8, Cloris' first speech. 
 
 2 Hunt, 'the.' » Hunt, 'on.'
 
 POETRY NEEDS VERSE. 2>7 
 
 the heavens, so she, in the blaze of her beauty, 
 on earth. This is imagination fairly displac- 
 ing fancy. The following has enchanted every- 
 body: — 
 
 Her lips were red, and one was thin 5 
 
 Compared to ^ that was next her chin, 
 Some bee had stung it newly. 
 
 Every reader has stolen a kiss at that lip, gay or 
 grave. 
 
 With regard to the principle of Varietvin lo 
 Uniformity by which verse ought to be modu- 
 lated, and oneness of impression diversely pro- 
 duced, it has been contended by some that 
 Poetry need not be written in verse at all; that 
 prose is as good a medium, provided poetry be 15 
 conveyed through it; and that to think otherwise 
 is to confound letter with spirit, or form with 
 essence. But the opinion is a prosaical mistake. 
 Fitness and unfitness iox jong, or metrical excite- 
 ment, just make all the difference between a 20 
 poetical and prosaical subject; and the reason 
 why verse is necessary to the form of poetry is 
 that thjgperf ection oi poetical spirit cl_crnands it ; 
 — that the circle of its enthusiasm, beauty, and 
 power, is incomplete without it. I do not mean 25 
 to say that a poet can never show himself a poet 
 in prose; but that, being one, his desire and 
 necessity will be to write in verse; and that, if 
 he were unable to do so, he would not, and could 
 not, deserve his title. Verse to the true poet is i^ 
 
 1 Hunt, 'with.' 
 
 -^(««t
 
 38 POETRY NEEDS VERSE. 
 
 no clo>^-. It is idly called a trammel and a 
 difficulty. It is a help. It springs from _the 
 same enthusiasm as the re5t.~oL_his impulses, ajid 
 is necessary to their satisfaction and effect. 
 
 5 Verse is no more a clog than the condition of 
 
 'rushing upward is a clog to fire, or than the 
 
 roundness and order of the globe we live on is a 
 
 clog to the freedom and variety that abound 
 
 within its sphere. Verse is no dominator over 
 
 10 the poet, except inasmuch as the bond is recip- 
 rocal, and the poet dominates over the verse. 
 They are lovers, playfully challenging each other's 
 rule, and delighted equally to rule and to obey. 
 Verse is the final proof to the poet that his 
 
 15 mastery over his art is complete. It is the 
 shutting up of his powers in ' mcasurcfiil con- 
 tent ';i the answer of form to his spirit; of 
 strength and ease to his guidance. It is the 
 willing action, the proud and fiery happiness, of 
 
 20 the winged steed on whose back he has vaulted, 
 
 To - witch the world with noble ^ horsemanship.^ 
 
 Verse, in short, is that finishing, and rounding, 
 and ' tuneful planeting ' of the poet's creations, 
 which is produced of necessity by the smooth 
 25 tendencies of their energy or inward working, 
 and the harmonious dance into which they are 
 attracted round the orb of the beautiful. Poetry, 
 in its complete sympathy with beauty, must of 
 
 1 Adapted from Macbeth 2. i. 17, 'measureless content.' 
 
 2 Shakespeare has 'and.' 
 
 3 Hunt, 'wondrous.' * i ILnry IV. \. \. no.
 
 POETRY NEEDS VERSE. 39 
 
 necessity leave no sense of the beautiful, and no 
 power over its forms, unmanifested; and verse 
 flows as inevitably from this condition of its 
 integrity, as other laws of proportion do from any 
 other kind of embodiment of beauty (say that of 5 
 the human figure), however free and various the • 
 movements may be that play within their limits. 
 What great poet ever wrote his poems in prose ? 
 or where is a good prose poem, of any length, to 
 be found ? ^ The poetry of the Bible is under- 10 
 stood to be in verse, in the original.^ Mr. Hazlitt 
 has said a good word for those prose enlargements 
 of some fine old song, which are known by the 
 name of Ossian;^ and in passages they deserve 
 what he said; but he judiciously abstained from 15 
 saying anything about the form. Is Gesner's 
 Death of Abel a poerii .-' or Hervey's Meditations .'' 
 The Pilgrim's Progress has been called one; and 
 undoubtedly Bunyan had a genius which tended 
 to make him a poet, and one of no mean order: 20 
 and yet it was of as ungenerous and low a sort as 
 was compatible with so lofty an affinity; and this 
 is the reason why it stopped where it did. He 
 had a craving after the beautiful, but not enough 
 of it in himself to echo to its music. On the 25 
 other hand, the possession of the beautiful will 
 not be sufficient without force to utter it. The 
 
 ^ But cf. Sidney's Defense of Poesy 11 8-25; Shelley's Defense 
 7 33-10 7. 
 
 2 Cf. my edition of The Bible and English Prose Style, pp. 
 liv-lviii. 
 
 3 Hazlitt, Lectures on the English Poets, close of chap. i.
 
 40 SIGNS OF EXCELLENCE. 
 
 author of Telemachus ^ had a soul full of beauty 
 and tenderness. He was not a man who, if he 
 had had a wife and children, would have run away 
 from them, as Bunyan's hero did, to get a place 
 5 by himself in heaven. He was ' a little lower 
 than the angels,'^ like our own Bishop Jewells^ 
 and Berkeleys;'* and yet he was no poet. He 
 was too delicately, not to say feebly, absorbed in 
 his devotions to join in the energies of the 
 
 10 seraphic choir. 
 
 Every poet, then, is a versifier; every fine poet 
 an excellent one:, and he is the best whose 
 verse exhibits the greatest amount of strength, 
 sweetness, straightforwardness, unsuperfluousness, 
 
 15 variety, and oneness; — oneness, that is to say, 
 
 consistency, in the general impression, metrical 
 
 and moral; and variety, or every pertinent 
 
 diversity of tone and rhythm, in the process. 
 
 Strength is the muscle of verse, and shows 
 
 20 itself in the number and force of the marked 
 syllables; as, 
 
 Sonorous m6tal blowing mkrtial s6unds.^ 
 
 1 Fenelon (1661-1715). 
 
 2Ps. 8. 5; Heb. 2. 7. 
 
 ' .See the testimonies to his worth in l\iissell's Book of Authors 
 (Chandos Classics), p. 21. 
 
 * ULshop Atterbury said of him: 'So much understanding, so 
 much knowledge, so much innocence, and so much humility I 
 did not think had been the portion of any but angels until I saw 
 this gentleman.' Pope's lines are well known: 
 
 ' Manners with candor are to Benson given. 
 To Berkeley every virtue under heaven.' 
 
 '' /'. /.. r. 540. Hunt gives only ' Paradise Lost' in the text.
 
 STRENGTH IN POETRY. 4 1 
 
 Behemoth, biggest born of eJirth, uphtiaved 
 His vastness.^ 
 
 Blow, winds, and cn\ck your cheeks! rkge! blow! 
 
 You cataracts and liurricanoes, spout 
 
 Till you have drfench'd our steeples, drbwn'd the cocks! 5 
 
 You siilphurous and thought-executing fires, 
 
 Vaunt-couriers to oak-cl&aving thunderbolts, 
 
 Singe my white hiad! And thou, ;\ll-shaking thunder, 
 
 Smite ^ fliit the tliick rotundity o' the world! ^ 
 
 Unexpected locations of the accent double this 10 
 force, and render it characteristic of passion and 
 abruptness. And here comes into play the 
 reader's corresponding fineness of ear, and his 
 retardations and accelerations in accordance with 
 those of the poet: — 15 
 
 Then in the keyhole turns 
 The intricate wards, and every bolt and bar 
 [Of massy iron or solid rock with ease}* 
 Unfastens. On a sildden open fly 
 With impetuous recoil and jarring sound 20 
 
 The infernal doors, and on their hinges grate 
 Harsh thunder.^ 
 
 Abominable, inutterable," and worse 
 Than fables yet have feigned.^ 
 
 Wkllowing unwieldy, enormous in their gait.^ 25 
 
 Of unusual passionate accent, there is an 
 exquisite specimen in the Fairy Queen, where 
 
 1 P. L. 7. 471-472. Hunt, 'Id.' 
 
 - Hunt, ' strike.' 
 
 ^ lung Lear 2,- 2. 1-7. Hunt has 'Lear.' 
 
 '* Hunt omits without notice. 
 
 5 P. L. 2. 876-SS2. Hunt has ' Par. Lost, Book U.' 
 
 3 Hunt, ' unutterable.' 
 
 ■?/'. Z. 2. 626-627. Hunt, 'Id.' s/'.Z. 7. 411.
 
 42 STRENGTH IN POETRY. 
 
 Una is lamenting her desertion by the Red-Cross 
 
 Knight: — 
 
 But he, my Lyon, and my noble Lord, 
 How does he find in cruell hart to hate 
 5 Her, that him lov'd, and ever most adord 
 
 As the God of my life? Why hath he me abhordP^ 
 
 See the whole stanza, with a note upon it, in the 
 present volume.^ 
 
 Theab-Use of strength is harshness and heavi- 
 10 ness; the reverse of it is weakness. There is a 
 noble sentiment — it appears both in Daniel's 
 and Sir John Beaumont's works, but is most 
 probably the latter's — which is a perfect outrage 
 of strength in the sound of the words : — 
 
 15 Only the firmest and the constanfst hearts 
 
 God sets to act the stout''st and hardest parts.^ 
 
 Stoiifst and constanfst for ' stoutest ' and ' most 
 constant!' It is as bad as the intentional 
 crabbcdness of the line in Hudibras:* — 
 
 20 He that hangs or beats out's brains, 
 
 The devil's in him if he feigns. 
 
 Beats oiifs brains, for 'beats out his brains.' Of 
 heaviness, Davenant's Gondibert is a formidable 
 specimen, almost throughout: — 
 
 25 With silence (6rder's help, and mkrk of c^re) 
 
 They chid'' tliat noise which heedless youth effect;* 
 Still course for use, for health th6y cl6anlyness ' w^re, 
 And save in wtllflxed hrms, all nkeness checked. 
 
 1 /'". ^. I. 3. 7. 2 Cf. p. 35, note I. 
 
 * This quotation I have not succeeded it finding. 
 
 < 2. TO. 497-49S. 5 Hunt, 'chide.' « Hunt, 'affect.' 
 
 ^ Hunt, 'cleanness.'
 
 WEAKNESS IN POETRY. 43 
 
 Th^y thought, those that, unarmed, exp6sed frkil life, 
 
 But naked nature valiant!)' betrayed; 
 Who was, tliougli naked, safe, till pride made strife, 
 
 But made defc;nse must use, now dh,nger's made.^ 
 
 And so he goes digging and lumbering on, like a 5 
 heavy preacher thiunping the pulpit in italics, and 
 spoiling many ingenious reflections. 
 
 Weakness in versification is want of accent and 
 emphasis. It generally accompanies prosaical- 
 ness, and is the consequence of weak thoughts, 10 
 and of the affectation of a certain well-bred 
 enthusiasm. The writings of the late Mr. Hayley 
 were remarkable for it ; and it abounds among the 
 lyrical imitators of Cowley, and the whole of what 
 is called our French school of poetry, when it 15 
 aspired above its wit and 'sense.' It sometimes 
 'breaks down in a horrible, hopeless manner, as 
 if giving way at the first step. The following 
 ludicrous passage in Congreve, intended to be 
 particularly fine, contains an instance: — 20 
 
 And lo! Silence himself is here; 
 Methinks I see the midnight god appear. 
 
 In all his downy pomp arrayed, 
 Behold the reverend shade. 
 
 An ancient sigh he sits tip07i! ! ! 25 
 
 Whose memory of sound is long since gone, 
 And purposely annihilated for his throne I ! !'- 
 
 See also the would-be enthusiasm of Addison 
 about music: — 
 
 1 Canto 3. sts. 8, 9. 
 
 2 'Ode on the singing of Mrs. .Vraljella Hunt.' Hunt in.serts 
 in text. 
 
 i-
 
 44 MERE SMOOTHNESS UNDESIRABLE. 
 
 For ever consecrate the day 
 To music and Cecilia j 
 Music, the greatest good that mortals know, 
 And all of heaven we have ]:)elow, 
 c Music can noble hints impat't / / f^ 
 
 It is observable that the unpoetic masters of 
 ridicule are apt to make the most ridiculous 
 mistakes, when they come to affect a strain 
 hii^her than the one they are accustomed to. 
 
 lo Hut no wonder. Their habits neutralize the 
 enthusiasm it requires. 
 
 Srivectness, though not identical with smooth- 
 ness, any more than feeling is with sound, always 
 incTudes it; and smoothness is a thing so little to 
 
 15 be regarded for its own sake, and indeed so worth- 
 less in poetry, but for some taste of sweetness, 
 that I have not thought necessary to mention it 
 by itself; though such an all-in-all in versification 
 was it regarded not a hundred years back, that 
 
 20 Thomas Warton, himself an idolater of Spenser, 
 ventured to wish the following line in the Fairy 
 Queen, 
 
 Yet - was admired much of f ooles, wdmen, and boys ^ — 
 
 altered to 
 25 Yet was admired much of women, fools, and boys — 
 
 thus destroying the fine scornful emphasis on the 
 first .syllable of 'women!' (an ungallant intima- 
 
 1 A Soni;for St. Cirilid's Day al Oxford, str. 3. 
 
 2 Hunt, 'And.' 
 * /''. Q. 5- 2. 30.
 
 SWEETNESS IN POETRY. 45 
 
 tion, by the way, against the fair sex, very 
 startling in this no less woman-loving than great 
 poet). Any^ poctast^r_j:an be smooth. Smooth- 
 ness abounds in all small poets, as sweetness does 
 in the greater. Sweetness is the smoothness of j 
 / grace and delicacy — of the sympathy with the 
 pleasing and lovely. Spenser is full of it — 
 Shakespeare — Beauniont and Fletcher — Cole- 
 ridge. Of Spenser's and Coleridge's versifica- 
 tion it is the prevailing characteristic. Its main 10 
 secrets are a smooth progression between variety 
 and sameness, and a voluptuous sense of the 
 continuous — 'linked sweetness long drawn out.' ^ 
 Observe the lirst and last lines of the stanza in 
 the Fairy Queen, describing a shepherd brushing 15 
 away the gnats; — the open and the close ^'s in 
 the one, 
 
 As gentle sh^pheard in sweete eventide ^ — 
 
 and the repetition of the word oft, and the fall 
 from the vowel a into the two ?/s in the other, — 20 
 
 He ^ brusheth oft, and oft doth mhr their murmurings. 
 
 So in his description of two substances in the 
 handling, both equally smooth, — 
 
 Each smoother seems than each, and each than each seems 
 
 smoother.'^ ,. 
 
 An abundance of examples from his poetry will 
 be found in the volume before us. His beauty 
 revolves on itself with conscious loveliness. And 
 
 1 U Allegro 139. 3 Hunt, ' She.' 
 
 2 /'.(?. I. I. 23. 4 1 have not found this.
 
 4<3 STRAIGHTFORWARDNESS. 
 
 Coleridge is worthy to be named with him, as the 
 reader will see also, and has seen already. Let 
 him take a sample meanwhile from the poem 
 called the Day-Dream ! Observe both the variety 
 5 and sameness of the vowels, and the repetition of 
 the soft consonants: — 
 
 My eyes make pictures when they are ^ shut : — 
 
 I see a fountain, large and fair, 
 A willow and a ruined hut, 
 10 And thee and me and Mary there. 
 
 O Mary! make thy gentle lap our pillowj 
 
 Bend o'er 7ts, like a bower, my beaiitiful green willow. 
 
 By StraisrJiiforiuardness is meant the flow of 
 words in their natural order, free alike from mere 
 
 15 prose, and from those inversions to which bad 
 poets recur in order to escape the charge of prose, 
 but chiefly to accommodate their rimes. In 
 Shadwell's play of Psyche,^ Venus gives the 
 sisters of the heroine an answer, of which the 
 
 20 following is the etitire substance, literally, in so 
 many words. The author had nothing better for 
 her to say: — 
 
 I receive your prayers with kindness, and will give suc- 
 cess to your hopes. I have seen, with anger, mankind adore 
 25 your sister's beauty and deplore her scorn: which they shall 
 do no more. For I'll .so resent their idolatry, as shall con- 
 tent your wishes to the full. 
 
 Now in default of all imagination, fancy, and 
 
 expression, how was the writer to turn these 
 
 30 words into poetry or rime .'' Simply by diverting 
 
 1 Hunt, ' they 're.' 2 published in 1674.
 
 JNVERTLD FKOSE. 47 
 
 them from their natural order, and twisting the 
 halves of the sentences each before the other. 
 
 With kindness I your prayers receive, 
 And to your hopes success will give. 
 I have, with anger, seen mankind adore S 
 
 Your sister's beauty and her scorn deplore; 
 
 Which they shall do no more. 
 For their idolatry I'll so resent. 
 As shall your wishes to the full content!! ^ 
 
 This is just as if a man were to allow that there 10 
 was no poetry in the words, 'How do you find 
 yourself .?' 'Very well, I thank you;' but to hold 
 them inspired, if altered into 
 
 Yourself how do you find ? 
 
 Very well, you I thank.^ 15 
 
 It is true, the best writers in Shadwell's ase 
 were addicted to these inversions, partly for their 
 own reasons, as far as rime was concerned, and 
 partly because they held it to be writing in the i 
 classical and Virgilian manner. What has since 20 
 been called Artificial J^oetry wa s then flo urishing, 
 in contradistinction to Natural;_.^iji)etry seen 
 chiefly through art and books, and not in its first 
 s„ources. But when the artificial poet partook of 
 
 1 Venus' Song in Act i. 
 
 2 In his Preface, Hunt alludes to the unintentional similarity 
 of this comparison with a note of Coleridge's in the Biographia 
 Literaria (p. 1S6 of tne Bohn edition): 'As the ingenious gentle- 
 man under the influence of the Tragic Muse contrived to dislo- 
 cate, " I wish you a good morning, sir! " " Thank you, sir, and 
 I wish you the same," into two blank-verse heroics: 
 
 To you a morning good, good sir! I wish. 
 You, sir! I thank; to you the same wish I.'
 
 48 DRYDEiVS STRAIGJirFORWARDNESS. 
 
 the natural, or, in other words, was a true poet 
 
 [after his kind, his best was always written in his 
 
 iHiost natural and straightforward manner. Hear 
 
 Shadwell's antagonist Dryden. Not a particle of 
 
 5 inversion, beyond what is used for the sake of 
 
 emphasis in common discourse, and this only in 
 
 one line (the last but three), is to be found in his 
 
 immortal character of the Duke of Buckingham : — 
 
 A man so various, that he seemed to be 
 
 10 Not one, but all mankind's epitome: 
 
 Stiff in opinions, always in the wrong. 
 Was everything by starts, and nothing long; 
 But in the course of one revolving moon 
 Was chemist, fiddler, statesman, and buffoon; 
 
 15 Then all for women, painting, riming,^ drinking. 
 
 Besides ten thousatid freaks that died in thinking. 
 Blest madman/ who could every hour employ 
 With something new to wish or to enjoy/ 
 Railing and praising were his usual themes, 
 
 20 And both, to show his judgment, in extremes: 
 
 So over-violent or over-civil 
 That every tnan with him was God or Devil. 
 In squandering wealth was his peculiar art; 
 A^othing went unrewarded, hiit desert. 
 Beggared by fools whom still he found too late, 
 He had his jest, and they had his estate.^ 
 
 Inversion itself was often turned into a grace 
 in these poets, and may be in others, by the 
 power of being superior to it ; using it only with 
 30 1 a classical air, and as a help lying next to them, 
 1 instead of a salvation which they are obliged to 
 
 1 Hunt, 'riming, dancing.' 
 ^Absalom and Achitopkcl 545-562. 
 
 2;
 
 INVERSION IN DRYDEN. 49 
 
 seek. In jesting passages also it sometimes gave 
 the rime a turn agreeably wilful, or an appear- 
 ance of choosing what lay in its way; as if a man 
 should pick up a stone to throw at another's head, 
 where a less confident foot would have stumbled 5 
 over it. Such is Dryden's use of the word might 
 — the mere sign of a tense — in his pretended 
 ridicule of the monkish practice of rising to sing 
 psalms in the night. 
 
 And much they grieved to see so nigh their hall 10 
 
 The bird that warned St. Peter of his fall; 
 
 That he should raise his mitred crest on high, 
 
 And clap his wings and call his family 
 
 To sacred rites; and vex the ethereal powers 
 
 With midnight matins at uncivil hours; 15 
 
 Nay more, his quiet neighbors should molest 
 
 Just in the sweetness of their 7norning rest. 
 
 (What a line full of ' another doze ' is that ! ) 
 
 Beast of a bird! supinely when he might 
 
 Lie snug and sleep, to rise before the light! 20 
 
 What if his dull forefathers used that cry? 
 
 Could he not let a bad example die ? ^ 
 
 I the more gladly quote instances like those of 
 Qiyden to illustrate the points in question, 
 because they are specimens of the very highest 25 
 kind of writing in the heroic couplet upon subjects 
 not heroical. As to prosaicalness in general, it is 
 sometimes indulged in by young writers on the 
 plea of its being natural; but this is a mere 
 confusion of triviality with propriety, and is 30 
 usually the result of indolence. 
 
 1 The Hind and the Panther 3. io05-i'Ot6.
 
 50 UNSUPERFLUOUSNESS ESSENTIAL. 
 
 Utisupcrjiiiousness is rather a matter of style_iri_^. 
 general, than of the sound and order of words: 
 and yet versification is so much strengthened by 
 it, and so much weakened by its opposite, that it 
 5 could not but come within the category of its 
 requisites. When superfluousness of words is not 
 occasioned by overflowing animal spirits, as in 
 Beaumont and Fletcher, or by the very genius of 
 luxury, as in Spenser (in which cases it is enrich- 
 to ment as well as overflow), there is no worse sign 
 [ for a poet altogether, except pure barrenness. 
 Every word that could be taken away from a 
 poem, unreferable to either of the above reasons 
 for it, is a damage ; and many such are death ; 
 15 for there is nothing that posterity seems so 
 determined to resent as this want of respect for 
 its time and trouble. The world is too rich in 
 books to endure it. Even true poets have died of 
 this Writer's Evil. Trifling ones have survived, 
 20 with scarcely any pretensions but the terseness of 
 their trifles. What hope can remain for wordy 
 mediocrity } Let the discerning reader take up 
 any poem, pen in hand, for the purpose of 
 discovering how many words he can strike out 
 25 of it that give him no requisite ideas, no relevant 
 ones that he cares for, and no reasons for the 
 rime beyond its necessity, and he will see what 
 blot and havoc he will make in many an admired 
 production of its day — what marks of its inevita- 
 30 ble fate. Bulky authors in particular, however 
 .safe they may think themselves, would do well to
 
 VARIETY IN VERSIFICATION. 5 I 
 
 consider what parts of their cargo they might 
 dispense with in their proposed voyage down the 
 gulfs of time; for many a gallant vessel, though 
 indestructible in its age, has perished; — many a 
 load of words, expected to be in eternal demand, 5 
 gone to join the wrecks of self-love, or rotted in 
 the warehouses of change and vicissitude. I have 
 said the more on this point, because in an age 
 when the true inspiration has undoubtedly been 
 re-awakened by Coleridge and his fellows, and we 10 
 have so many new poets coming forward, it may 
 be as well to give a general warning against that 
 tendency to an accumulation and ostentation of 
 thongJits} which is meant to be a refutation in full 
 of the pretensions of all poetry less cogitabund, 15 
 whatever may be the requirements of its class. 
 Young writers should bear in mind, that even 
 some of the very best materials for poetry are 
 not poetry built; and that the smallest marble 
 shrine, of exquisite workmanship, outvalues all 20 
 that architect ever chipped away. Whatever can 
 be so dispensed with is rubbish. 
 
 -Variety in versification consists in whatsoever 
 can bedone-for the prevention of monotony, by 
 diversity of stops and cadences, distribution of 25 
 emphasis, and retardation and acceleration of 
 time; for the whole real secret of versification 
 is a musical secret, and is not attainable to any 
 vital effect save by the ear of genius. All the 
 mere knowledge of feet and numbers, of accent 30 
 
 1 Cf. some of Browning's poetry, for instance. 
 
 V
 
 52 THE MUSIC OF VERSE. 
 
 ' and quantity, will no more impart it, than a 
 knowledge of the Guide to Music will make a 
 Beethoven or a Paisiello. It is a matter of 
 sj.iruiibility and iniagination ; of the beautiful in 
 5 poetical passion, aceomjiaiiied by musical; of the 
 imperative necessity for a pause here, and a 
 cadence there, and a quicker or slower utterance 
 in this or that place, created by analogies of 
 sound with sense, by the fluctuations of feeling, 
 
 lo by the demands of the gods and graces that visit 
 the poet's harp, as the winds visit that of ^Eolus. 
 The same time and quantity which are occasioned 
 by the spiritual part of this secret, thus become 
 its formal ones — not feet and syllables, long and 
 
 15 short, iambics or trochees; which are the reduc- 
 tion of it to its less than dry bones. You might 
 get, for instance, not only ten and eleven, but 
 thirteen or fourteen syllables into a riming, as 
 well as blank, heroical verse, if time and the 
 
 20 feeling permitted; and in irregular measure this 
 is often done; just as musicians put twenty notes 
 in a bar instead of two, quavers instead of minims, 
 according as the feeling they are expressing 
 impels them to fill u]) the time with short and 
 
 25 hurried notes, or with long; or as the choristers 
 in a cathedral retard or precipitate the words of 
 the chant, according as the quantity of its notes, 
 and the colon which divides the verse of the 
 psalm, conspire to demand it. Had the moderns 
 
 30 borne this j^rinciple in mind when they settled 
 the prevailing .systems of verse, instead of learning
 
 MONOTONY IN VERSIFICATION. 53 
 
 them, as they appear to have done, from the first 
 drawling and one-syllabled notation of the chureh 
 hymns, we should have retained all the advantages 
 of the mofe numerous versification of the ancients, 
 without being compelled to fancy that there was 5 
 no alternative for us between our syllabical 
 uniformity and the hexameters or other special 
 forms unsuited to our tongues. But to leave this 
 question alone, we will present the reader with a 
 few sufficing specimens of the difference between 10 
 monotony and variety in versification, first from 
 JPope, Dryden, and Milton, and next from Gay and 
 Coleridge. The following is the boasted melody 
 of the nevertheless exquisite poet of the Rape of 
 the Lock — exquisite in his wit and fancy, though 15 
 not in his numbers. The reader will observe 
 that it is literally seesaw, like the rising and 
 falling of a plank, with a light person at one end 
 who is jerked up in the briefer time, and a heavier 
 one who is set down more leisurely at the other. 20 
 It is in the otherwise charming description of the, 
 heroine of that poem : — 
 
 On l^.er white breast — a sparkling cross she wore, 
 
 Which Jews might kiss — and infidels adore; 
 
 Her lively looks — a spriglitly mind disclose, 25 
 
 Quick as her eyes — and as unfixed as those. 
 
 Favors to none — to all she smiles extends, 
 
 Oft she rejects — but never once offends; 
 
 Bright as the sun — her eyes the gazers strike, 
 
 And like the sun — they shine on all alike; 3° 
 
 Yet graceful ease — and sweetness void of pride, 
 
 Might hide her faults — if belles had faults to hide;
 
 54 VARIETY IN VERSIFICATION. 
 
 If to her share — some female errors fall, 
 Look oil her face — and you'll forget 'em all.i 
 
 Compare with this the description of Iphigenia 
 in one of Dryden's stories from Boccaccio : — 
 
 5 It happened — on a summer's holiday, 
 
 That to the greenwood shade — he took his way, 
 
 For Cymon shunned the church — and used not much 
 
 to pray: 
 His quarter-staff — which he could ne'er forsake, 
 10 Hung half before — and half behind his back. 
 He trudged along — unknowing 2 what he sought, 
 And whistled as he went — for want of thought. 
 
 By chance conducted — or by thirst constrained. 
 The deep recesses of the ^ grove he gained; 
 
 15 Where — in a plain defended by the ^ wood, 
 Crept through the matted grass — a crystal flood, 
 By whicli — an alabaster fountain stood; J 
 
 And on the margcnt of the fount was laid — 
 Attended by her slaves — a sleeping maid; 
 
 20 Like Dian and her nymphs — when, tired with sport, 
 To rest by cool Eurotas they resort. — 
 The dame herself — the goddess well expressed, 
 
 Not more distinguished by her purple vest 
 
 Than by the charming features of her^ face — 
 
 25 And, even ^ in slumber — a superior grace: 
 
 Her comely limbs — composed with decent care, 
 Her body shaded — with a slight " cymarr. 
 Her bosom to the view — was only bare; 
 Where two beginning paps were scarcely spied, — 
 
 30 For yet their places were but signified. — 
 
 1 Rape of the Lock 2. 7-18. ■* Hunt, ' the.' 
 
 2 Hunt, 'not knowing.' ''Hunt, ' o'en.' 
 8 Hunt, ' a.' 6 Hunt, ' by a light.'
 
 VARIETY IN VERSIFICATION. 55 
 
 The fanning wind upon her bosom blows, — "^ 
 
 To meet the fanning wind — the bosom rose; ( 
 
 The fanning wind — and puding streams * — continue f 
 her repose.^ 
 
 For a further variety take, from the same ; 
 
 author's Theodore and Honoria, a passage in 
 
 which the couplets are run one into the other, 
 
 and all of it modulated, like the former, according 
 
 to the feeling demanded by the occasion: — 
 
 Whilst listening to the murmuring leaves he stood — 10 
 
 More than a mile immersed within the wood — 
 
 At once the wind was laid. | — The whispering sound 
 
 Was dumb. | — A rising earthquake rocked the ground. 
 
 With deeper brown the grove was overspread — '^ 
 
 A sudden horror seized his giddy head — y 15 
 
 And his ears tinkled — and his color fled. J 
 
 Nature was in alarm. — Some danger nigh 
 
 Seemed threatened — though unseen to mortal eye. 
 
 Unused to fear — he summoned all his soul, 
 
 And stood collected in himself — and whole : 20 
 
 Not long.3 — 
 
 But for a crowning specimen of variety of pause 
 
 and accent, apart from emotion, nothing can 
 
 surpass the account, in Paradise Lost, of the 
 
 Devil's search for an accomplice: — 25 
 
 There was a pl^ce, 
 (Now not — though Sin — • not Time — first wrought 
 
 the change) 
 Where Tigris — at the foot of Pkradise, 
 Into a gulf — shot under ground — till pkrt 7fl 
 
 Rose up a fountain by the Tree of Life. 
 In with the river sunk — and lulth it rbse 
 Sktan — invblved in rising mist — then sought 
 
 1 Hunt, ' stream.' 2 Cymon and Iphigenia 79-106. 
 
 ^ Theodore and Honoria 88-99.
 
 56 VARIETY IN VERSIFICATION. 
 
 Wliere to lie hid. — S&a he had searched — and land 
 From Eden over P6ntus — and the Pool 
 Maeotis — up beyond the river Ob; 
 Downward as i\x antarctic; — and in length 
 j West from Orontes — to the ocean barred 
 At Darien — thence to the Iknd where flows 
 Gknges and Indus. — Thus the orb he roamed 
 With njirrow search, — and with inspection deep 
 Considered ^very creature — which of kll 
 lo Most opportune might s^rve his wiles — and found 
 The Serpent — sulitlest bciast of all the field. ^ 
 
 If the reader cast his eye again over this passage, 
 he will not find a verse in it which is not varied 
 and harmonized in the most remarkable manner. 
 15 Let him notice in particular that curious balancing 
 of the lines in the sixth and tenth verses: — 
 
 In with the river sunk, &c. 
 and 
 
 Up beyond tlie river Ob. 
 
 20 It might, indeed, be objected to the versifica- 
 tion of Milton, that it exhibits too constant a 
 perfection of this kind. It sometimes forces 
 upon us too great a sense of consciousness on 
 the part of the composer. We miss the first 
 sprightly runnings of verse — the ease and 
 sweetness of spontaneity. Milton, I think, also 
 *too often condenses weight into heaviness. 
 
 Thus much concerning the chief of our two 
 
 most popular measures. The other, called octo^- 
 
 30 syllabic, or the measure of eight syllables, offered 
 
 such facilities for namby-pamby, that it had become 
 
 a jest as early as the time of Shakespeare, who 
 
 1 P. L. 9. 69-86.
 
 OCTOSYLLABIC I'KRSR. 57 
 
 makes Touchstone call it.the ' butter-woman's rank ^ 
 to market,' and the ' very false gallop of verses.' ^ 
 It has been advocated, in opposition to the 
 heroic measure, upon the ground that ten syllables 
 lead a man into epithets and other superfluities, 5 
 while eight syllables compress him into a sensible 
 and pithy gentleman. But the heroic measure 
 laughs at it. So far from compressing, it converts 
 one line into two, and sacrifices everything to the 
 r|uick and importunate return of the rime. 10 
 With Dryden compare Gay, even in the strength 
 of Gay:^ — , ^ , 
 
 The wind was high, the window shakes; 
 
 With sudden^ start the miser wakes; 
 Along the silent room he stalks, 
 
 (A miser never 'stalks;' but a rime was desired 
 for ' walks ') 
 
 Looks back, and trembles as he walks; 
 
 Each lock and every bolt he tries, 
 
 In every creek and corner pries; 20 
 
 Then opes the chest with treasure stored, 
 
 And stands in rapture o'er his hoard; 
 
 (' Hoard ' and ' treasure stored ' are just made for 
 one another,) 
 
 But now, with sudden qualms possessed, 25 
 
 He wrings his hands, he beats his breast; 
 By conscience stung, he wildly stares, 
 And thus his guilty soul declares. 
 
 1 Hunt, ' rate.' 
 
 -As You Like Lt 3. 2. 103, iig. Hunt confuses the seven- 
 syllabled trochaic (and that on a single riming sound) with the 
 eight-syllabled iambic. 
 
 3 Fable Sixth.
 
 u 
 
 58 COLERIDGE'S MUSICAL SENSE. 
 
 And SO he denounces his gold, as miser never 
 denounced it; and sighs because 
 
 Virtue resides on earth no more! 
 
 Coleridge saw the mistake which had been 
 
 5 made with regard to this measure, and restored 
 it to the beautiful freedom of which it was 
 capable, by calling to mind the liberties allowed 
 its old musical professors the minstrels, and 
 dividing it'^y^mi' instead of syllables; — by the 
 
 10 beat of fo7ir, imb-\vhich you might get as many 
 syllables as you could, instead of allotting eight 
 syllables to the poor time, whatever it might have 
 to say. He varied it further with alternate 
 rimes and stanzas, with rests and omissions 
 
 15 precisely analogous to those in music, and ren- 
 dered it altogether worthy to utter the manifold 
 thoughts and feelings of himself and his lady 
 Christabel. He even ventures, with an exquisite 
 sense of solemn strangeness and license (for there 
 
 20 is witchcraft going forward), to introduce a couplet 
 of blank verse, itself as mystically and beautifully 
 modulated as anything in the music of GliJck or 
 Weber : — 
 
 'Tis tlie middle of night by the castle clock, 
 25 And the owls have awakened the crowing cock; 
 
 Tu — whit! — Tu — whoo! 
 And hark, again! the crowing cock, 
 How drowsily it^ crew. 
 Sir Leoline, the baron rich, 
 Hath a toothless mastiff, which 2 
 
 1 Hunt, 'he' Mlimt, '1)itch.'
 
 MUSIC IN CIIRISTABEL. 59 
 
 From her kennel beneath the rock 
 
 Maketh^ answer to the clock, ' 
 
 Four for the quarters, and twUve for thS /loiir, 
 
 Ever and aye, by shine and shower. 
 
 Sixteen short howls, not over loud; 5 
 
 Some say, she sees my lady's shroud. 
 
 Is the night dully and dark ? 
 
 TJte ntght'is chilly) Mt not dark. 
 
 The thin gray cloud is spread on high, 
 
 It covers but not hides the sky. lo 
 
 The moon is behind, and at the full. 
 
 And yet she looks both small and dull. 
 
 The night is chill,^ the cloud is gray; 
 
 (These are not superfluities, but mysterious 
 returns of importunate feeling) 15 
 
 '7» a motith before the month of May, 
 
 And the spring comes slowly 7ip this way. 
 
 The lovely lady, Christabel, 
 
 Whom her father loves so well. 
 
 What makes her in the wood so late, 20 
 
 A furlong from the castle-gate ? 
 
 She had dreams all yesternight 
 
 Of her own betrothed knight; 
 
 And she in the midnight wood will pray 
 
 For the weal of her lover that's far away. 25 
 
 She stole along, she nothing spoke, 
 
 The sighs she heaved were soft and low, 
 
 And naught was green upon the oak. 
 
 But moss and rarest misletoe; 
 
 She kneels beneath the huge oak tree, 3° 
 
 And in silence prayeth she. 
 
 1 Hunt, ' She maketh.' - Hunt, ' chilly.'
 
 6o MUSIC IN CHRISTABEL. 
 
 The lady sprang up suddenly, 
 The lovely lady, Christabel ! 
 It moaned as near as near can be. 
 But what it is, she cannot tell. — 
 5 On the other side it seems to be 
 
 Of the huge, brohd-breksted, old okk tr^e. 
 
 The n\%\\\. is chill; tlie forest bare; 
 Is it the wind that moaneth bleak? 
 
 (This ' bleak moaning- ' is a witch's) 
 
 10 There is not wind enough in the air 
 
 To move away the ringlet curl 
 From the lovely lady's cheek — 
 There is not wind enough to twirl 
 The one red l^af, the last of its clan 
 
 15 That dances as often as dance it can, 
 
 Hanging so light and hanging so high, 
 On the topmost twig that looks vp at the sky 
 
 Husli, beating heart of Christabel! 
 Jesu iMaria, shield her well! 
 20 She folded her arms beneath her cloak. 
 
 And stole to the other side of the oak. 
 What sees she there.'' 
 
 There she sees a damsel bright, 
 
 Drest in a silken robe of white. ^ 
 25 That shadowy in the moonlight shone: 
 
 I'he neck that made that white robe wan, 
 
 Her stately neck and arms were bare; 
 
 Her blue-veined feet unsandaled were; 
 
 And wildly glittered here and there 
 30 The gems entangled in her hair. 
 
 I guess \\s7i9, frightful there to see 
 
 A lady so i-ichly clad as she — 
 
 Beautiful exceedingly. 
 
 ^ Hunt, 'Dressed in a robe of silken white.'
 
 MASTERY ()/' RI^. 6 1 
 
 The princi^ileof Variety in Uniformity is here 
 worked out in a style 'beyond the reach of art'.U 
 Everything; is diversified according to the demand 
 of the moment, of the sounds, the sights, the 
 emotions; the very uniformity of the outline is 5 
 gently varied; and yet we feel that the whole is 
 one and of^_the__s^qi)ie character, the single and 
 sweet unconsciousness of the heroine making all 
 the rest seem more conscious, and ghastly, and 
 expectant. It is thus that versification itself 10 
 becomes part ofithe sentiment of a poem, and vindi- 
 cate the pains that^have been taken to show 
 its importance. I know of no very fine versifica- 
 tion unaccompanied with fine poetry; no poetry 
 of a mean order accompanied with verse of the 15 
 highest. 
 
 -AsJ:o_liime, which might be thought too insig- 
 nificant to mention, it is not at all so. The 
 universal consent of modern Europe, and of the 
 East in all ages, has made it one__of th e musi cal 20 
 beautie^s_QjL_verse for all poetry but epic and 
 dramatic, and even for the former with Southern 
 Europe — a sustai nment fo r the enthusiasmj, and 
 a demand to enjoy. The mastery of It consists in 
 never writing it for its own, sake, or at least never 25 
 appearing to do so ; in knowing how to vary i^, 
 to give it novelty, to render it more or less strong, 
 to divide- it. (when not in couplets) at the proper 
 intervals, to repeat it many times where luxury 
 or animal spirits demand it (see an instance in 30
 
 62 EMPHATIC AND COMIC RIMES. 
 
 Titania's speech to the Fairies^), to impress an 
 affecting or startling remark with it, and to make 
 it, in comic poetry, a new and surprising addition 
 to the jest. 
 
 5 Large was his bounty and his soul sincere, 
 Heaven did a recompense as largely send; 
 He gave to miserv all he had, a tear ; 
 
 He gained from heaven ('twas all he wished) a friend!^ 
 
 The fops are proud of scandal; for they cry 
 10 At every lewd, low character, — ' That's /.' ^ 
 
 What makes all doctrines plain and clear? 
 About two hundi'ed pounds a year. 
 And that which was proved true before. 
 Prove false again ? Tivo hundred more.* 
 
 15 Compound for sins they are inclined to, 
 By damning those they have no mind to.^ 
 
 Stored with deleterv medicines, 
 
 Which whosoever took is dead since. ^' 
 
 Sometimes it is a grace in a master like Butler to 
 20 force his rime, thus showing a laughing wilful 
 power over the most stubborn materials : — 
 
 Win 
 The women, and make them draw in 
 The men, as Indians with -^ female 
 25 Tame elephant inveigle the male.'' 
 
 ^ Midsum7Hcr Nif^lifs Dream 3. i. 172 ff. 
 
 2 Gray's Elegy. Hunt inserts i\\fi geticra I reference in the text, 
 as in all these instances. 
 
 2 Dryden, Prologue to the Pilgrim of Fletcher. (Scott's ed. 
 of Dryden, 8. 441.) 
 
 * I/itdibras 3. i. 1277-1280. ''■ I/iul. i. 4. 317-318. 
 
 ^ Ilud. I. I. 215-216. ' Ilud. I. 2. 587-588.
 
 RIME MAY SUGGEST THOUGHT. 63 
 
 He made an instrument to know 
 
 If the moon shines at full or no; 
 
 That- would, as soon as e'er she shotie, straight 
 
 Whether 'twere day or night dctnonstrate j 
 
 Tell what her diameter to an inch is, 5 
 
 And prove that she's not made oi green cheese.^ 
 
 Pronounce it, by all means, grinchcs, to make 
 the joke more wilful. The happiest triple rime, 
 perhaps, that ever was written, is in Don Juan: — 
 
 But oh! ye lords of ladies /«/t'//6r/?/rt/, 'o 
 
 Inform us truly, — haven't they hen-pecked you all?- 
 
 The sweepingness of the assumption completes 
 the flowing breadth of effect. 
 
 Dryden confessed that a rime often gave him a 
 thought.'"^ Probably the happy word 'sprung' in 15 
 the following passage from Ben Jonson was 
 suggested by it; but then the poet must have 
 had the feeling in him : — 
 
 — Let our trumpets sound, 
 
 And cleave both air and ground 20 
 
 With beating of our drums. 
 Let every lyre be strung, 
 Harp, lute, theorbo, sprung 
 
 With touch of dainty thumbs J^ 
 
 Boi.leau's trick for appearing to rime naturally 25 
 was to compose the second line of his couplet 
 first! which gives one the crowning idea of the 
 
 '^ Hud. 2. 3. 261-266. 
 
 "^ Don Juan, Canto i. st. 22. 
 
 3 Perhaps referring to his Essay of Dramatic Poesy, near the 
 begmning of Meander's defense of rime. 
 
 '^ An Ode, or Song, by all the Muses, in celebration of lier 
 Majesty's Birthday, i6jo. For ' dainty ' Gifford reads ' learned.'
 
 t 
 
 64 HOW TO KNOW GOOD POETS. 
 
 'artificial school_ of poetry.' Perhaps the most 
 perfect master of rime, the easiest and most 
 abundant, was the greatest writer of comedy 
 that the world has seen — Moliere.^ 
 5 If a young reader should ask, after all, What is 
 ^the quickest way of knowing bad poets from good, 
 the best poets from the next best, and so on ? the 
 answer is, the only and twofold way: first^he 
 perusal of the best poets with the greatest atten- 
 
 10 tion; and, second, the cultivation of that love of 
 truth and beauty which made them what they are. 
 Every true reader of poetry partakes a more than 
 ordinary portion of the poetic nature; and no one 
 can be completely such, who does not love, or 
 
 15 take an interest in, everything that interests the 
 poet, from the firmament to the daisy — from the 
 highest heart of man to the most pitiable of the 
 low. It is a good practice to read with pen in 
 hand, marking what is liked or doubted. It 
 
 20 rivets the attention, realizes the greatest amount 
 of enjoyment, and facilitates reference. It 
 enables the reader also, from time to time, to 
 see what progress he makes with his own mind, 
 and how it grows up towards the stature of its 
 
 25 exalter. 
 
 If the same person should ask, What class of 
 poetry is the highest } I should say, undoubtedly, 
 t he ep ic;^ for it includes the drama, with narra- 
 tion besides; or the speaking and action of the 
 
 1 Cf. Hoileau, Satire 2. 
 
 2 See Sidney's Defense 30 27, and note; on the other side 
 Aristotle's Foetks, near the end.
 
 A SCALE OF POETS 65 
 
 characters, with the speaking of the poet himself, 
 whose utmost address is taxed to relate all well 
 for so long a time, particularly in the passages 
 least sustained by enthusiasm. Whether this 
 class has included the greatest poet, is another ^ 
 question still under trial; for Shakespeare per- 
 plexes all such verdicts, even when the claimant 
 is Homer; though, if a judgment may be drawn 
 from his early narratives (Venus and Adonis, and 
 the Rape of Lucrece), it is to be doubted whether 10 
 even Shakespeare could have told a story like 
 Homer, owing to that incessant activity and 
 superfoetation of thought, a little less of which 
 might be occasionally desired even in his plays; 
 — if it were possible, once possessing anything 15 
 of his, to wish it away. Next to Homer and 
 Shakespeare come such narrators as the less 
 universal, but still intenser Dante; Milton, with / 
 
 his dignified imagination; the universal, pro- 
 foundly simple Chaucer; and luxuriant, remote 20 
 Spenser — immortal child in poetry's most poetic 
 solitudes: then the great second-rate dramatists; 
 unless those who are better acquainted with Greek 
 tragedy than I am, demand a place for them before 
 Chaucer: then the airy, yet robust univer_sality of 25 
 Ariosto; the hearty, out-of-door nature of Theo- 
 critus, also a universalist ; the finest lyrical poets 
 (who only take short flights, compared with the 
 narrators) ; the purely contemplative poets who 
 have more thought than feeling ; the descriptive, 30 
 satirical, didactic, epigrammatic.^ It is to be borne 
 
 1 Cf. Sidney, Defense V 34 ff.
 
 66 A SCALE OF I-'ACULT/ES. 
 
 in mind, however, that the first poet of an inferior 
 class may be superior to followers in the train of 
 a higher one, though the superiority is by no 
 means to be taken for granted; otherwise Pope 
 5 would be superior to Fletcher, and Butler to Pope. 
 Imagination, teeming^ with action and character, 
 makes the greatest poets; feeling and thought the 
 ne xt; fancy (by itself) Jhcjiext ; wit the last. 
 Thought by itself makes no poet at all ; Tor^TlTe-- 
 
 xo mere conclusions of the understanding can at 
 best be only so many intellectual matters of fact. 
 Feeling, even destitute of conscious thought, 
 stands a far better poetical chance; feeling being 
 a sort of thought without the process of thinking 
 
 15 — a grasper of the truth without seeing it. And 
 what is very remarkable, feeling seldom makes 
 the blunders that thought does. An idle distinc- 
 tion has been made between taste and judgment. 
 Taste is the very maker of judgment. Put an 
 
 20 artificial fruit in your mouth, or only handle it, 
 and you will soon perceive the difference between 
 judging from taste or tact, and judging from the 
 abstract figment called judgment. The latter 
 does but throw you into guesses and doubts. 
 
 25 Hence the conceits that astonish us in the 
 gravest, and even subtlest thinkers, whose taste 
 is not proportionate to their mental perceptions: 
 men like Donne, for instance; who, apart from 
 accidental personal impressions, seem to look at 
 
 30 nothing as it really is, but only as to what may 
 be thought of it. Hence, on the other hand, the
 
 ONE STAR DIFFERETH FROM ANOTHER. 67 
 
 clelightf Illness of those poets who never violate 
 truth of feeling, whether in things real or imagi- 
 nary; who are always consistent with their object 
 and its requirements; and who run the great 
 round of nature, not to perplex and be perplexed, ■ s 
 but to make themselves and us happy. And 
 luckily, delightfulness is not incompatible with 
 greatness, willing soever as men may be in their 
 present imperfect state to set the power to sub- 
 jugate above the power to please. Truth, of 10 
 any great kind whatsoever, makes great writing. 
 This is the reason why such poets as Ariosto, 
 though not writing with a constant detail of 
 thought and feeling like Dante, are justly con- 
 sidered great as well as delightful. Their great- 15 
 ness proves itself by the same truth of nature, 
 and sustained power, though in a different way. 
 Their action is not so crowded and weighty; 
 their sphere has more territories less fertile ; but 
 it has enchantments of its own, which excess of 20 
 thought would spoil — luxuries, laughing graces, 
 animal spirits ; and not to recognize the beauty and 
 greatness of these, treated as they treat them, is 
 simply to be defective in sympathy. Every planet 
 is not Mars or Saturn. There is also Venus and 25 
 Mercury. There is one genius of the south, and 
 another of the north, and others uniting both. 
 The reader who is too thoughtless or too sensitive 
 to like intensity of any sort, and he who is too 
 thoughtful or too dull to like anything but the 3a 
 greatest possible stimulus of reflection or passion,
 
 68 LIKI\G SJJOULD BE CATHOLIC. 
 
 arc equally wanting in complexional fitness for a 
 thorough enjoyment of books. Ariosto occasion- 
 ally says as fine things as Dante, and Spenser as 
 Shakespeare; Init the business of both is to enjoy; 
 5 and in order to i)artake tlieir enjoyment to its fidl 
 extent, you must feel what poetry is in the general 
 as well as the particular, must be aware that there 
 are different songs of the spheres, some fuller of 
 notes, and others of a sustained delight ; and as 
 
 10 the former keep you perpetually alive to thought 
 or passion, so from the latter you receive a con- 
 stant harmonious sense of truth and beauty, more 
 agreeable perhaps on the whole, though less 
 exciting. Ariosto, for instance, does not tell 
 
 15 a story with th(? brevity and concentrated passion 
 of Dante; every sentence is not so full of matter, 
 nor the style so removed from the indifference 
 of prose; yet you are charmed with a truth of 
 another sort, equally characteristic of the writer, 
 
 20 equally drawn from nature and substituting a 
 healthy sense of enjoyment for intenser emotion. 
 Exclusiveness of liking for this or that mode of 
 truth, only shows, either that a reader's percep- 
 tions arc limited, or tliat he would sacrifice truth 
 
 25 itself to his favorite form of it. Sir Walter 
 Raleigh, who was as trenchant with .his pen as 
 his sword, hailed the Faery Queen of his friend 
 Spenser in verses in which he said that Petrarch 
 was thenceforward to be no more heard of;^ and 
 
 1 All suddenly I saw the Faery Queene; 
 At whose approch the soule of Petrarke wept, 
 And from thenceforth those graces were not seene.
 
 THE POET'S CREATIONS LIKE NATURE'S. O9 
 
 that in all English poetry there was nothing he 
 counted ' of any price ' but the effusions of the 
 new author.^ Yet Petrarch is still living; Chaucer 
 was not abolished by Sir Walter; and Shakespeare 
 is thought somewhat valuable. A botanist might 5 
 as well have said that myrtles and oaks were to 
 disappear, because acacias had come up. It is 
 with the poet's creations as with Nature's, great 
 or small. Wherever truth and beauty, whatever 
 their amount, can be worthily shaped into verse, 10 
 and answer to some demand for it in our hearts, 
 there poetry is to be found; whether in produc- 
 tions grand and beautiful as some great event, or 
 some mighty, leafy solitude, or no bigger and more 
 pretending than a sweet face or a bunch of violets; 15 
 whether in Homer's epic or Gray's Elegy, in the 
 enchanted gardens of Ariosto and Spenser, or the 
 very pot-herbs^ of the Schoolmistress of Shen- 
 stone, the balms of the simplicity of a cottage. 
 Not to know and feel this is to be deficient in the 20 
 universality of Nature herself, who is a poetess on 
 the smallest as well as the largest scale, and who 
 calls upon us to admire all her productions ; not 
 indeed with the same degree of admiration, but 
 with no refusal of it, except to defect. 25 
 
 I cannot draw this essay towards its conclu- 
 sion better than with three memorable words of 
 Milton ; who has said, that poetry, in comparison 
 
 1 Of me no lines are loved, nor letters are of price, 
 
 Of all which speak our English tongue, but those of thy 
 device. 
 
 2 The Schoohnistress sts. 11, 12, 13.
 
 JO THE POET MUST BE EARNEST. 
 
 with science,,^ is ' simple, sensuous, and passionatp.' 
 By simple, he means unpcrplcxcd and self-evident; 
 by sensuous, genial and full of imagery; by pas-^ 
 sionate, excited and enthusiastic, I am aware 
 5 that different constructions have been put on 
 some of these words; but the context seems to 
 me to necessitate those before us. I quote, how- 
 ever, not from the original, but from an extract 
 in the Remarks on Paradise Lost by Richardson. 
 
 lo Wh§t the poet has to cultivate above all things 
 is love and truth; — what he has to avoid, like 
 poison, is the fleeting and the false. He will get 
 no good by proposing to be ' in earnest at the 
 moment.' His earnestness must be innate and 
 
 15 habitual; born with him, and felt to be his most 
 precious inheritance. ' I expect neither profit 
 or 2 general fame by my writings,' says Coleridge, 
 in the Preface to his Poems; 'and I consider 
 myself as having been amply repaid without 
 
 20 either. Poetry has been to me its " own exceed- 
 ing great reward ;'' it has soothed my afflictions; 
 it has multiplied and refined my enjoyments; it 
 has endeared solitude; and it has given me the 
 habit of wishing to discover the good and the 
 
 25 beautiful in all that meets and surrounds me.'^ 
 ' Poetry,' says Shelley, ' lifts the veil from 
 the hidden beauty of the world, and makes 
 
 ' Not in comparison with science, but with rhetoric. See 
 Milton's tractate On Education. 
 
 '^ Hunt, 'nor.' 
 
 " Hunt inserts, ' l'icl<cring's edition, p. 10;' but it is found in 
 ail the good editions.
 
 THE POET UNDERVALUES NOBODY. Jl 
 
 familiar objects be as if they tverc not familiar ; 
 it reproduces all that it represents, and the 
 impersonations clothed in its Elysian light stand 
 thenceforward in the minds of those who have 
 once contemplated them, as memorials of that 5 
 gentle and exalted content 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 identi- 
 fication of ourselves with the beautiful which 10 
 exists in thought, action, or person, not our own. 
 A man, to be greatly good, must imagine intensely 
 and comprehensively; he must put himself in the 
 place of another, and of many others ; the pains 
 and pleasures of his species must become his 15 
 own. The great instrument of moral good is 
 the^ irnagination; and poetry administers to the 
 effect by acting upon the cause.' ^ 
 
 I would not willingly say anything after perora- 
 tions like these; but as treatises on poetry may 10 
 chance to have auditors who think themselves 
 called upon to vindicate the superiority of what 
 is termed useful knowledge, it may be as well 
 to add, that if the poet may be allowed to pique 
 himself on any one thing more than another, 25 
 compared with those who undervalue him, it is 
 on that power of undervaluing nobody, and no 
 attainments different from his own, which is 
 given him by the very faculty of imagination 
 
 1 Hunt omits 'the.' 
 
 2 See my edition of the Defense of Poetry, 13 27-14 12; Hunt 
 inserts, 'Essays and Letters, vol. i, p. i6.'
 
 72 THE POET A XL) THE RAILROAD. 
 
 \\ they despise. I The greater includes the less. 
 They do not see that their inability to compre- 
 hend him argues the smaller capac ity. J No man 
 recognizes the worth of utility more than the 
 5 poet; he only desires that the meaning of the 
 term may not come short of its greatness, and 
 excJude the noblest necessities of his fellow- 
 creatures. He is quite as much pleased, for 
 instance, with the facilities for rapid conveyance 
 
 lo afforded him by the railroad, as the dullest con- 
 finer of its advantages to that single idea, or as 
 the greatest two-ideaed man who varies that single 
 idea with hugging himself on his ' buttons ' or his 
 good dinner. But he sees also the beauty of the 
 
 15 country through which he passes, of the towns, of 
 the heavens, of the steam-engine itself, thunder- 
 ing and fuming along like a magic horse, of the 
 affections that are carrying, perhaps, half the 
 passengers on their journey, nay, of those of the 
 
 20 great two-ideaed man ; and, beyond all this, he 
 discerns the incalculable amount of good, and 
 knowledge, and refinement, and mutual considera- 
 tion, which this wonderful invention is fitted to 
 circulate over the globe, perhaps to the displace- 
 
 25 ment of war itself, and certainly to the diffusion 
 of millions of enjoyments. 
 
 'And a button-maker, after all, invented it!' 
 cries our friend. 
 
 Pardon me — it was a nobleman. A button- 
 
 30 maker may be a very excellent, and a very poetical 
 man too, and yet not have been the first man
 
 BACON'S OPINION OF POETRY. 73 
 
 Visited by a sense of the gigantic powers of the 
 combination of water and fire. It was a noble- 
 man who first thought of this most poetical bit of 
 science. It was a nobleman who first thought of 
 it— a captain who first tried it, — and a button- 5 
 maker who perfected it.^ And he who put the 
 nobleman on such thoughts, was the great philos- 
 opher Bacon,^ who said that poetry had ' some- , 
 thing divine in it,' ^ and was necessary to the 
 satisfaction of the human mind. 
 
 \ 
 
 1 The Marquis of Worcester (1601-1667), Captain Savery (ca. 
 1650-1715), and IJoulton (172S-1809), the business associate of 
 Watt, and, in some sense, co-inventor with him. It can hardly 
 be doubtful that Watt could not have introduced and perfected 
 his invention without the assistance of Boulton. See Smiles' 
 Lives of Boulton and Watt. Hunt's statement can, of course, 
 only be admitted in a rhetorical sense, and not at all as a precise 
 historical truth. 
 
 2 Dircks says nothing of any indebtedness to Bacon in his 
 Life, Times, etc. of ihe Second Marqtcis of Worcester (London, 
 1865) 
 
 ^ From the De Augment. Scient. 2. 13 (ed. Spedding, Ellis, 
 and Heath, i. 519): ' Divinitatis cujuspiam particeps videri 
 possit.' See Adv. Learn. 2. 4. 2.
 
 NOTE ON THE DISTINCTION BETWEEN 
 IMAGINATION AND FANCY. 
 
 The distinction between imagination and fancy, of 
 which so much account has been made in English 
 poetical criticism, was of course not originated by 
 Leigh Hunt. So far as is known, Coleridge was the 
 first English writer who effected a clear severance be- 5 
 tween the two, but he only elaborated upon a hint 
 wnich he drew from Richter's Vorschule der yEsthetik \\ 
 (Brandl, Life of Coleridge, pp. 316-317). The theory 1 \ 
 is also found in one of Wordsworth's Prefaces, no 
 doubt as a fruit of the discussions on poetry between 10 
 himself and Coleridge (see 79 16 ff., infra). Leigh Hunt, 
 therefore, merely illustrates and confirms a view al- 
 ready current, as he, in turn, is quoted and enlarged 
 upon by Ruskin in Vol. IK. of Modern Painters 
 ('Of Imagination Penetrative'). The passages from 15 
 Richter, Coleridge, and Wordsworth which establish 
 the derivation of the theory are here appended. It 
 will be noted that the ' fancy ' of the English writers 
 IS by Richter termed ' Einbildungkraft,' while their 
 ' imagination ' is his ' Phantasie ' oder ' Bildung- 20 
 kraft.' 
 
 Foot-notes are by the present editor, except as indi- 
 cated. 
 
 75
 
 76 NOTE OX IMAUJNATION AND FANCY. 
 
 JEAN PAUL RICHTER. 
 
 [Vorsc/iule dcr yEst/tetik, Programm II, § 6 and 7.] 
 
 Einbildungkraft ist die Prose der Bildungkraft oder 
 Phantasie. Sie ist nichts als eine potenzirte hellfar- 
 bigere Erinnerung/ welche auch die Thiere haben, 
 weil sie traumen und weil sie fiirchten. Ihre Bilder 
 5 sind nur ziigeflogne Abblatterungen von der wirklichen 
 Welt; Fieber, Nervenschwache, Getranke konnen diese 
 Bilder so verdicken und beleiben, dass sie aus der in- 
 nern Welt in die aussere treten und darin zu Leibern 
 erstarren. 
 
 10 Aber etwas hoheres ist die Phantasie oder Bildung- 
 kraft, sie ist die Welt-Seele der Seele und der Elemen- 
 targeist der iibrigen Krafte; darum kann eine grosse 
 Phantasie zwar in die Richtungen einzelner Krafte, 
 z. B. des Witzes, des Scharisinns u. s. w. abgegraben 
 
 15 und abgeleitet werden, aber keine dieser Krafte lasset 
 sich zur Phantasie erweitern. Wenn der Witz das 
 spielende Anagrmnm der Natur ist, so ist die Phan- 
 tasie das Hieroglyphen-Alphahet derselben, wovon sie 
 mit wenigen Bildern ausgesprochen wird. Die Phan- 
 
 20 tasie macht alle Theile zu Ganzen — statt dass die 
 iibrigen Krafte und die Erfahrung aus dem Naturbuche 
 nur Blatter reissen — und alle Welttheile zu Welten, 
 sie totalisiret alles, auch das unendliche All ; daher 
 tritt in ihr Reich der poetische Optimismus, die Schon- 
 
 25 heit der Gestalten, die es bewohnen, und die Freiheit, 
 womit in ihrem Aether die Wesen wie Sonnen gehen. 
 
 1 See 80 I C ff.
 
 COLERIDGE. yj 
 
 Sie fiihrt gleichsam das Absolute und das Unendliche 
 der Vernunft naher und anschaulicher vor den sterb- 
 lichen Menschen. Daher braucht sie so viel Zukunft 
 und so viel Vergangenheit, ihre beiden Schopfung- 
 Ewigkeiten, weil keine andere Zeit unendlich oder zu 5 
 einem Ganzen werden kann ; nicht aus einem Zimmer 
 voll Luft, sondern erst aus der ganzen Hohe der Luft- 
 saule kann das Aetherblau eines Himmels geschaffen 
 werden. 
 
 11. 
 COLERIDGE. 
 
 \Biographia Litera7-ia, chap. 4.] 
 
 Repeated meditations led me first to suspect — and 10 
 a more intimate analysis of the human faculties, their 
 appropriate marks, functions, and effects, matured my 
 conjecture into full conviction — that fancy and imagi- y 
 
 nation were two distinct and widely different faculties, 
 instead of being, according to the general belief, either 15 
 two names with one meaning, or, at furthest, the lower 
 and higher degree of one and the same power. It is 
 not, I own, easy to conceive a more opposite transla- 
 tion of the Greek <jiavTacrLa than the Latin imaginatio ; 
 but it is equally true that in all societies there exists 20 
 an instinct of growth, a certain collective, unconscious 
 good sense, working progressively to desynonymize 
 those words originally of the same meaning, which the 
 conflux of dialects had supplied to the more homo- 
 geneous languages, as the Greek and German, and 25 
 which the same cause, joined with accidents of trans- 
 lation from original works of different countries, occa- 
 sion in mixed languages like our own. The first 
 and most important point to be proved is, that two
 
 78 NOTE ON IMAGINATION AND FANCY. 
 
 conceptions perfectly distinct are confused under one 
 and the same word, and — this done — to appropri- 
 ate that word exclusively to one meaning, and the 
 synonyme, should there be one, to the other. But if 
 5 — as will be often the case in the arts and sciences 
 — no synonyme exists, we must either invent or 
 borrow a word. In the present instance the appro- 
 priation has^ already begun, and been legitimated in 
 the derivative adjective : Milton had a highly ifuagina- 
 
 10 tive, Cowley a very fanciful mind. If, therefore, I 
 should succeed in establishing the actual existence of 
 two faculties generally different, the nomenclature 
 would be at once determined. To the faculty by 
 which I had characterized Milton, we should confine 
 
 15 the term imagination; while the other would be contra- 
 distinguished as fancy. Now were it once fully ascer- 
 tained that this division is no less grounded in nature 
 than that of delirium from mania, or Otway's 
 
 Lutes, laurels, seas of milk, and ships of amber,^ 
 
 20 from Shakespeare's 
 
 What ! have his daughters brought him to this pass P^ 
 
 or from the preceding apostrophe to the elements, the 
 theory of the fine arts, and of poetry in particular, 
 could not, I thought, but derive some additional and 
 
 25 important light. It would, in its immediate effects, 
 furnish a torch of guidance to the philosophical critic, 
 and ultimately to the poet himself. In energetic 
 minds truth soon changes by domestication into 
 power ; and, from directing in the discrimination and 
 
 30 appraisal of the product, becomes influencive in the 
 
 1 First edition, ' had.' 2 Venice Preserved, Act V. 
 8 King Lear 3. 4. 66.
 
 COLERIDGE. 79 
 
 production. I'o admire on principle is the only way 
 to imitate without loss of originality. 
 
 . . . There was a time, certainly, in which I took 
 some little credit to myself in the belief that I had 
 been the first of my countrymen who had pointed out 5 
 the diverse meaning of which the two terms were 
 capable, and analyzed the faculties to which they 
 should be appropriated. Mr. W. Taylor's recent 
 volume of synonymes I have not yet seen ; but his 
 specification of the terms in question ^ has been clearly 10 
 shown to be both insufficient and erroneous by Mr. 
 Wordsworth, in the preface added to the late collec- 
 tion of his Lyrical Ballads, and other poems. The 
 explanation which Mr. Wordsworth has himself given 
 will be found to differ from mine chiefly, perhaps, as 15 
 our objects are different. It could scarcely indeed 
 happen otherwise, from the advantage I have enjoyed 
 of frequent conversation with him, on a subject to 
 which a poem of his own first directed my attention, 
 and my conclusions concerning which he had made 20 
 more lucid to myself by many happy instances drawn 
 from the operation of natural objects on the mind. 
 But it was Mr. W^ordsworth's purpose to consider the 
 influences of fancy and imagination as they are mani- 
 fested in poetry, and from the different effects to con- 25 
 elude their diversity in kind ; while it is my object to 
 investigate the seminal principle, and then from the 
 kind to deduce the degree. My friend has drawn a 
 masterly sketch of the branches, with their poetic 
 fruitage. I wish to add the trunk, and even the 3° 
 roots as far as they lift themselves above ground, 
 and are visible to the naked eye of our common con- 
 sciousness. 
 
 1 Cf. infra SO 35-81 15.
 
 8o WORDS WOJi Tff. 
 
 \Biographia Literaria, chap. 13.] 
 
 The imagination then I consider either as pri- 
 mary or secondary. The primary imagination I hold 
 to be the living power and prime agent of all human 
 perception, and a.s a repetition in the finite mind of 
 5 the eternal act of creation in the infinite I am. The 
 secondary I consider as an echo of the former, co- 
 existing with the conscious will, yet still as identical 
 with the primary in the kind of its agency, and differ- 
 ing only in degree, and in the mode of its operation. 
 
 10 It dissolves, diffuses, dissipates, in order to re-create ; 
 or where this process is rendered impossible, yet still, 
 at all events, it struggles to idealize and to unify. It 
 it essentially vital, even as all objects (as objects) are 
 essentially fixed and dead. 
 
 15 Fancy, on the contrary, has no other counters to 
 play with but fixities and definites. The Fancy is 
 indeed no other than a mode of memory ^ emancipated 
 from the order of time and space ; and blended with, 
 and modified by, that empirical phenomenon of the 
 
 20 will, which we express by the word choice. But, 
 equally with the ordinary memory, it must receive all 
 its materials ready made from the law of association. 
 
 III. 
 
 WORDSWORTH. 
 [Pre/ace of 1815-1845], 
 
 Let us come now to the consideration of the words 
 Fancy and Imagination, as employed in the classifica- 
 25 tion of the following poems. 'A man,' says an in- 
 telligent author, 'has imagination in proportion as he 
 can distinctly copy in idea the impressions of sense : 
 
 ^Cf. 76 2.
 
 WORDS IVOR TH. 8 1 
 
 it is the faculty which images within the mind the phe- 
 nomena of sensation. A man has fancy in proportion 
 as he can call up, connect, or associate, at pleasure, 
 those internal images (</>avTa^eii/ is to cause to appear) 
 so as to complete ideal representations of absent ob- 5 
 jects. Imagination is the power of depicting, and ^ 
 fancy of evoking and combining. The imagination is 
 formed by patient observation ; the fancy by a volun- 
 tary activity in shifting the scenery of the mind. The 
 more accurate the imagination, the more safely may a 10 
 painter, or a poet, undertake a delineation, or a de- 
 scription, without the presence of the objects to be 
 characterized. The more versatile the fancy, the more 
 original and striking will be the decorations produced.' 
 — British Synonyms discriminated, by W. Taylor. 15 
 
 Is not this as if a man should undertake to supply 
 an account of a building, and be so intent upon what 
 he had discovered of the foundation, as to conclude 
 his task without once looking up at the superstructure ? 
 Here, as in other instances throughout the volume, the 20 
 judicious Author's mind is enthralled by etymology ; 
 he takes up the original word as his guide and escort, 
 and too often does not perceive how soon he becomes 
 its prisoner, without liberty to tread in any path but 
 that to which it confines him. It is not easy to find 23 
 out how imagination, thus explained, differs from dis- 
 tinct remembrance of images ; or fancy from quick 
 and vivid recollection of them : each is nothing more 
 than a mode of memorv. If the two words bear the 
 above meaning and no other, what term is left to 3° 
 designate that faculty of wliich the poet is 'all com- 
 pact ' ; ^ he whose eye glances from earth to heaven, 
 
 1 Mid. N. /?. 5. 1 . 8.
 
 Y 
 
 82 NOTE ON IMAGINATION AND FANCY. 
 
 whose spiritual attributes body forth what his pen is 
 prompt in turning to shajDC ; or what is left to charac- 
 terize Fancy, as insinuating herself into the heart of 
 objects with creative activity ? Imagination, in the 
 5 sense of the word as giving title to a class of the 
 following poems, has no reference to images that are 
 merely a faithful copy, existing in the mind, of absent 
 external objects ; but is a word of higher import, 
 denoting operations of the mind upon those objects 
 
 10 and processes of creation or of composition, governed 
 by certain fixed laws. 1 proceed to illustrate my 
 meaning by instances. A parrot hangs from the wires 
 of his cage by his beak or by his claws ; or a monkey 
 from the bough of a tree by his paws or his tail. Each 
 
 15 creature does so literally and actually. In the first 
 Eclogue of Virgil, the shepherd, thinking of the time 
 when he is to take leave of his farm, thus addresses 
 his goats : — 
 
 Non ego vos posthac viridi projectus in antro 
 20 Vi\xmo?,2t. pendere procul de rupe videbo. 
 
 half way down 
 
 Hangs one who gathers samphire, ^ 
 
 is the well-known expression of Shakespeare, delineat- 
 ing an ordinary image upon the cliffs of Dover. In 
 
 25 these two instances is a slight exertion of the faculty 
 which I denominate imagination, in the use of one 
 word : neither the goats nor the samphire-gatherer do 
 literally hang, as does the parrot or the monkey ; but, 
 presenting to the senses something of such an appear- 
 
 30 ance, the mind in its activity, for its own gratification, 
 contemplates them as hanging. 
 
 ' King Lear 4. G. 14-15; ' who ' for ' that.'
 
 WORDS WOR TH. 8 3 
 
 As when far off at sea a fleet descried 
 
 Hangs'^ in the clouds, by equinoctial winds 
 
 Close sailing from Bengala, or the isles 
 
 Of Ternate or Tidore, whence merchants bring 
 
 Their spicy drugs ; they on the trading flood, 5 
 
 Through the wide Ethiopian to the Cape, 
 
 Ply stemming nightly toward the pole ; so seemed 
 
 Far off the flying Fiend.- 
 
 Here is the full strength of the imagination involved 
 in the word hangs, and exerted upon the whole image: 10 
 First, the fleet, an aggregate of many ships, is repre- 
 sented as one mighty person, whose track, we know 
 and feel, is upon the waters ; but, taking advantage of 
 its appearance to the senses, the Poet dares to repre- 
 sent it as hanging in the clouds, both for the gratifica- 15 
 tion of the mind in contemplating the image itself, and 
 in reference to the motion and appearance of the 
 sublime objects to which it is compared. 
 
 From impressions of sight we will pass to those of 
 sound ; which, as they must necessarily be of a less 20 
 definite character, shall be selected from these volumes : 
 
 '? 
 
 Over his own sweet voice the Stock-dove broods ;^ 
 
 of the same bird, 
 
 His voice was buried among trees, 
 
 Yet to be come at by the breeze.* 25 
 
 O, Cuckoo ! shall I call thee Bird, 
 Or but a wandering Voice ! ^ 
 
 1 Cf. stipra, 12 1. 
 
 2 P. L. 2. 636-643. 
 
 3 Wordsworth, Independence and Resolution. 
 
 * Wordsworth, ' O Nightingale ! thou surely art.^ 
 6 Wordsworth, To the Cuckoo.
 
 84 NOTE ON IMAGINATION AND FANCY. 
 
 The stock-dove is said to coo, a sound well imitating 
 the note of the bird ; but, by the intervention of the 
 metaphor broods, the affections are called in by the 
 imagination to assist in marking the manner in which 
 
 5 the bird reiterates and prolongs her soft note, as if 
 herself delighting to listen to it, and participating of a 
 still and quiet satisfaction, like that which may be 
 supposed inseparable from the continuous process of 
 incubation. ' His voice was buried among the trees,' 
 
 10 a metaphor expressing the love of seclusion by which 
 this bird is marked ; and characterizing its note as 
 not partaking of the shrill and the piercing, and there- 
 fore more easily deadened by the intervening shade ; 
 yet a note so peculiar and withal so pleasing, that the 
 
 15 breeze, gifted with that love of the sound which the 
 poet feels, penetrates the shades in which it is en- 
 tombed, and conveys it to the ear of the listener. 
 
 Shall I call thee I'.ird, 
 
 Or but a wandering Voice ? 
 
 20 This concise interrogation characterizes the seeming 
 ubiquity of the voice of the cuckoo, and dispossesses 
 the creature almost of a corporeal existence ; the 
 Imagination being tempted to this exertion of her 
 power by a consciousness in the memory that the 
 
 25 cuckoo is almost perpetually heard throughout the 
 season of spring, but seldom becomes an object of 
 sight. 
 
 Thus far of images independent of each other and 
 immediately endowed by the mind with properties that 
 
 30 do not inhere in them, upon an incitement from prop- 
 erties and qualities the existence of which is inherent 
 and obvious. These processes of imagination are 
 carried on either by conferring additional properties
 
 WORDS IVOR TH. 8 5 
 
 upon an object, or abstracting from it some of those 
 which it actually possesses, and thus enabling it to re- 
 act upon the mind which hath performed the process, 
 like a new existence. 
 
 I pass from the Imagination acting upon an indi- 5 
 vidual image to a consideration of the same faculty 
 employed upon images in a conjunction by which they 
 modify each other. The reader has already had a 
 fine instance before him in the passage quoted from 
 Virgil, where the apparently perilous situation of the 10 
 goat, hanging upon the shaggy precipice, is contrasted 
 with that of the shepherd contemplating it from the 
 seclusion of the cavern in which he lies stretched at 
 ease and in security. Take these images separately, 
 and how unaffecting the picture compared with that 15 
 produced by their being thus connected with and 
 opposed to, each other ! 
 
 As a huge stone is sometimes seen to lie 
 
 Couched on the bald top of an eminence, 
 
 Wonder to all who do the same espy 20 
 
 15y what means it could thither come, and whence, 
 
 So that it seems a thing endued with sense, 
 
 Like a sea-beast crawled forth, which on a shelf 
 
 Of rock or sand reposeth, there to sun himself. 
 
 Such seemed this Man ; not all alive or dead 25 
 
 Nor all asleep, in his extreme old age. 
 
 Motionless as a cloud the old Man stood, 
 That heareth not the loud winds when they call, 
 And'moveth altogether if it move at all.i 
 
 In these images, the conferring, the abstracting, and 30 
 the modifying powers of the Imagination, immediately 
 
 1 Wordsworth's Resolution and Independence ; but with slight 
 variations from the received text of the poem.
 
 86 NOTE ON IMAGINATION AND FANCY. 
 
 and mediately acting, are all brought into conjunction. 
 The stone is endowed with something of the power of 
 life to approximate it to the sea-beast ; and the sea- 
 beast stripped of some of its vital qualities to assimi- 
 
 5 late it to the stone ; which intermediate image is thus 
 treated for the purpose of bringing the original image, 
 that of the stone, to a nearer resemblance to the 
 figure and condition of the aged man ; who is divested 
 of so much of the indications of life and motion as to 
 
 10 bring him to the point where the two objects unite 
 and coalesce in just comparison. After what has 
 been said, the image of the cloud need not be com- 
 mented upon. 
 
 Thus far of an endowing or modifying power : but 
 
 15 the Imagination also shapes and creates; and how."* 
 By innumerable processes ; and in none does it more 
 delight than in that of consolidating numbers into 
 unity, and dissolving and separating unity into num- 
 ber, — alternations proceeding from, and governed by, 
 
 20 a sublime consciousness of the soul in her own mighty 
 and almost divine powers. Recur to the passage al- 
 ready cited from Milton. When the compact fleet, 
 as one person, has been introduced ' Sailing from 
 Bengala.' 'They,' i.e. the 'merchants,' representing 
 
 25 the fleet, resolved into a multitude of ships, 'ply' 
 their voyage towards the extremities of the earth : 
 ' So ' (referring to the word ' As ' in the commencement) 
 ' seemed the flying P'iend ; ' the image of his person 
 acting to recombine the multitude of ships into one 
 
 30 body, — the point from which the comparison set out. 
 ' So seemed,' and to whom seemed .-• To the heavenly 
 Muse who dictates the poem, to the eye of the poet's 
 mind, and to that of the reader, present at one mo- 
 ment in the wide Ethiopian, and the next in the
 
 WORDS won TH. 8 7 
 
 solitudes, then first broken in upon, of the infernal 
 
 Modo me Thebis, modo \>o\\\\. Athenis.^ 
 
 regions ! 
 
 Here again this mighty poet, speaking of the Messiah 
 going forth to expel from heaven the rebellious angels, 5 
 
 Attended by ten thousand thousand Saints, 
 
 He onward came ; far off his coming shone, — ^ 
 
 the retinue of saints, and the Person of the Messiah 
 himself, lost almost and merged in the splendor of 
 that indefinite abstraction, ' His coming ! ' 10 
 
 As I do not mean here to treat this subject further 
 than to throw some light upon the present volumes, 
 and especially upon one division of them, I shall 
 spare myself and the reader the trouble of consider- 
 ing the Imagination as it deals with thoughts and 15 
 sentiments, as it regulates the composition of charac- 
 ters and determines the course of actions : I will not 
 consider it (more than I have already done by impli- 
 cation) as that power which, in the language of one 
 of my most esteemed friends, ' draws all things to one ; 20 
 which makes things animate or inanimate, beings with 
 their attributes, subjects with their accessories, take 
 one color and serve to one effect.' ^ The grand store- 
 houses of enthusiastic and meditative Imagination, of 
 poetical, as contradistinguished from human and dra- 25 
 matic Imagination, are the prophetic and lyrical parts 
 of the Holy Scriptures, and the works of Milton ; to 
 which I cannot forbear to add those of Spenser. I 
 select these writers in preference to those of ancient 
 Greece and Rome, because the anthropomorphitism 3° 
 
 1 Horace, Epist. 2. i. 213. 2 p £ g. 767-768. 
 
 3 Charles Lamb upon the genius of Hogarth. (Words- 
 worth's note.) 
 
 Y
 
 88 NOTE ON IMAGINATION AND FANCY. 
 
 of the Pagan religion subjected the minds of the 
 greatest poets in those countries too much to the 
 bondage of definite form ; from which the Hebrews 
 were preserved by their abhorrence of idolatry. This 
 S abhorrence was almost as strong in our great epic 
 Poet, both from circumstances of his life, and from 
 the constitution of his mind. However imbued the 
 surface might be with classical literature, he was a 
 Hebrew in soul ; and all things tended in him towards 
 
 10 the sublime. Spenser, of a gentler nature, maintained 
 his freedom by aid of his allegorical spirit, at one time 
 inciting hnn to create persons out of abstractions ; and, 
 at another, by a superior effort of genius, to give the 
 universality and permanence of abstractions to his 
 
 15 human beings, by means of attributes and emblems 
 that belong to the highest moral truths and the purest 
 sensations, — of which his character of Una is a glori- 
 ous example. Of the human and dramatic Imagina- 
 tion the works of Shakespeare are an inexhaustible 
 
 20 source. 
 
 I tax not you, ye elements, with unkindness, 
 
 I never gave you kingdoms, call'd you daughters ! ^ 
 
 And if, bearing in mind the many poets distinguished 
 by this prime quality, whose names I omit to mention; 
 
 25 yet justified by recollection of the insults which the 
 ignorant, the incapable and the presumptuous, have 
 heaped upon these and my other writings, I may be 
 permitted to anticipate the judgment of posterity upon 
 myself, I shall declare (censurable, I grant, if the 
 
 30 notoriety of the fact above stated does not justify me) 
 that I have given in these unfavorable times, evidence 
 
 1 Khig Lear 3. 2. 14-15; with substitution of 'ye' for 'you,' 
 'kingdoms' ff)r 'kiiu'dom.' nnd ' dau.f;hters ' for 'children.'
 
 WORDSWORTH. 89 
 
 of exertions of this faculty upon its worthiest objects, 
 the external universe, the moral and religious senti- 
 ments of Man, his natural affections, and his acquired 
 passions ; which have the same ennobling tendency as 
 the productions of men, in this kind, worthy to be 5 
 holden in undying remembrance. 
 
 To the mode in which Fancy has already been char- 
 acterized as the power of evoking and combining, or, 
 as my friend Mr. Coleridge has styled it, ' the aggrega- ^ 
 
 tive and associative power,' my objection is only that 10 
 the definition is too general. To aggregate and to 
 associate, to evoke and to combine, belong as well to 
 the Imagination as to the Fancy ; but either the 
 materials evoked and combined are different ; or they 
 are brought together under a different law, and for a 15 
 different purpose. Fancy does not require that the 
 materials which she makes use of should be suscep- 
 tible of change in their constitution, from her touch ; 
 and, where they admit of modification, it is enough for 
 her purpose if it be slight, limited, and evanescent. 20 
 Directly the reverse of these are the desires and 
 demands of the Imagination. She recoils from every- 
 thing but the plastic, the pliant, and the indefinite. 
 She leaves it to Fancy to describe Queen Mab as 
 coming, 25 
 
 In shape no bigger than an agate-stone 
 
 On the fore-finger of an alderman.^ 
 
 Having to speak of stature, she does not tell you that 
 her gigantic Angel was as tall as Pompey's Pillar ; 
 much less that he was twelve cubits, or twelve hundred 3° 
 cubits high ; or that his dimensions equalled those of 
 Teneriffe or Atlas ; — because these, and if they were 
 
 1 Ro7n. and Jul. i. ^. 55-56; cf. supra, 35 5 ff.
 
 90 NOTE ON IMAGINATION AND FANCY. 
 
 ■A million times as high it would be the same, are 
 bounded : The expression is, * His stature reached the 
 sky ! ' ^ the illimitable firmament ! — When the Imagin- 
 ation frames a comparison, if it does not strike on the 
 
 5 first presentation, a sense of the truth of the likeness, 
 from the moment that it is perceived, grows — and 
 continues to grow — upon the mind •, the resemblance 
 depending less upon outline of form and feature, than 
 upon expression and effect ; less upon casual and out- 
 
 10 standing, than upon inherent and internal, properties : 
 moreover, the images invariably modify each other. — 
 The law under which the processes of Fancy are 
 carried on is as capricious as the accidents of things, 
 and the effects are surprising, playful, ludicrous, amus- 
 
 15 ing, tender, or pathetic, as the objects happen to be 
 appositely produced or fortunately combined. Fancy 
 depends upon the rapidity and profusion with which 
 she scatters her thoughts and images ; trusting that 
 their number, and the felicity with which they are 
 
 20 linked together, will make amends for the want of in- 
 dividual value : or she prides herself upon the curious 
 subtilty and the successful elaboration with which she 
 can detect their lurking affinities. If she can win you 
 over to her purpose, and impart to you her feelings, 
 
 25 she cares not how unstable or transitory may be her 
 influence, knowing that it will not be out of her power 
 to resume it upon an apt occasion. But the Imagina- 
 tion is conscious of an indestructible dominion ; — the 
 Soul may fall away from it, not being able to sustain 
 
 30 its grandeur ; but, if once felt and acknowledged, by 
 no act of any other faculty of the mind can it be re- 
 laxed, impaired, or diminished. — Fancy is given to 
 
 1 r. L. 4. 988.
 
 woiinsivoi^ Til. 9 1 
 
 quicken and to beguile the temporal part of our nature, 
 Imagination to incite and to support the eternal. — ■ 
 Yet is it not the less true that Fancy, as she is an 
 active, is also, under her own laws and in her own 
 spirit, a creative faculty. In what manner Fancy am- 5 
 bitiously aims at a rivalship with Imagination, and 
 Imagination stoops to work with materials of Fancy, 
 might be illustrated from the compositions of all elo- 
 quent writers, whether in prose or verse ; and chiefly 
 from those of our own country. Scarcely a page of 10 
 the impassioned parts of Bishop Taylor's Works can 
 be opened that shall not afford examples. — Referring 
 the Reader to those inestimable volumes, I will con- 
 tent myself with placing a conceit (ascribed to Lord 
 Chesterfield) in contrast with a passage from the 15 
 Paradise Lost; — ■ 
 
 The dews of the evening most carefully shun, 
 
 They are the^ tears of the sky for the loss of the sun.^ 
 
 After the transgression of Adam, Milton, with other 
 appearances of sympathizing Nature, thus marks the 20 
 immediate consequence, 
 
 Sky lowered, and, muttering thunder, some sad drops 
 Wept at completion'' of the mortal sin.'* 
 
 The associating link is the same in each instance: 
 Dew and rain, not distinguishable from the liquid sub- 25 
 stance of tears, are employed as indications of sorrow. 
 A flash of surprise is the effect in the former case; a 
 flash of surprise, and nothing more ; for the nature of 
 
 ^ Properly ' those,' for ' they are the.' 
 
 2 Chesterfield, Advice to a Lady in Autumu. 
 
 8 Rather, ' completing.' 
 
 * P, L. 9. 1 002- 1 003. 
 
 r
 
 92 iXOTE O.V IMAGIA'ATION AND FANCY. 
 
 things does not sustain the combination. In the lat- 
 ter, the effects from the act, of which there is this 
 immediate consequence and visible sign, are so mo- 
 mentous, that the mind acknowledges the justice and 
 
 5 reasonableness of the sympathy in nature so mani- 
 fested ; and the sky weeps drops of water as if with 
 human eyes, as ' Earth had before trembled from her 
 entrails, and Nature given a second groan.' ^ 
 
 Finally, I will refer to Cotton's Ode upon Winter, 
 
 lo an admirable composition, though stained with some 
 peculiarities of the age in which he lived, for a gen- 
 eral illustration of the characteristics of Fancy. The 
 middle part of this ode contains a most lively descrip- 
 tion of the entrance of Winter, with his retinue, as 
 
 15 'A palsied king,' and yet a military monarch, — ad- 
 vancing for conquest with his army; the several bodies 
 of which, and their arms and equipments, are de- 
 scribed with a rapidity of detail, and a profusion of 
 yJz//r//>// comparisons, which indicate on the part of the 
 
 20 poet extreme activity of intellect, and a correspondent 
 hurry of delightful feeling. Winter retires from the 
 foe into his fortress, where 
 
 a magazine 
 
 Of sovereign juice is cellared in ; 
 25 Liquor that will the siege maintain 
 
 Should Phoebus ne'er return again. 
 
 Though myself a water-drinker, I cannot resist the 
 pleasure of transcribing what follows, as an instance 
 still more happy of Fancy employed in the treatment 
 30^ of feeling than, in its preceding passages, the Poem 
 supplies of her management of forms. 
 
 ' Adapted from P. L. 9. 1 000-1 001.
 
 WORDS IVOR TH. 93 
 
 'Tis that, that gives the poet rage, 
 And tliaws the gelly'd 1 blood of age ; 
 Matures the young, restores the old, 
 And makes the fainting coward bold. 
 
 It lays the careful head to rest, 5 
 
 Calms palpitations in the breast, 
 Renders our lives' misfortune sweet; 
 
 Then let the chill Sirocco blow, 
 
 And gird us round with hills of snow, 
 
 Or else go whistle to the shore, 10 
 
 And make the hollow mountains roar, 
 
 Whilst we together jovial sit 
 
 Careless, and crowned with mirth and wit, 
 
 Where, though bleak winds confine us home, 
 
 Our fancies round the world shall roam. 15 
 
 We'll think of all the friends we know, 
 And drink to all worth drinking to; 
 When having drunk all thine and mine. 
 We rather shall want healths tlian wine. 
 
 But where friends fail us, we'll supply 20 
 
 Our friendships with our charity; 
 Men that remote in sorrows live. 
 Shall by our lusty brimmers thrive. 
 
 We'll drink the wanting into wealth, 
 
 And those that languish into health, 25 
 
 The afflicted into joy, the opprest 
 
 Into security and rest. 
 
 The worthy in disgrace shall find 
 
 Favor return again more kind. 
 
 And in restraint who stifled lie, 30 
 
 Shall taste the air of liberty. 
 
 1 Qu. 'gelid,' or 'jellied' ?
 
 94 NOTE ON IMAGINATION AND FANCY. 
 
 The brave shall triumph in success, 
 The lovers shall have mistresses, 
 Poor unregarded Virtue, praise. 
 And the neglected Poet, bays. 
 
 5 Thus shall our healths do others good, 
 
 Whilst we ourselves do all we would ; 
 For, freed from envy and from care. 
 What would we be but what we are.?
 
 INDEX OF PROPER NAMES. 
 
 Achilles 22 27, 25 19,24, 2929. 
 Addison 3025, 43 28. 
 
 A Song for St. Cecilia's Day at 
 
 Oxford St. 3 : 44 l-fj. 
 Cato I. I : 30 iy-14, 18-21; 1.3: 
 3015-16; 1.4 : 30 17. 
 vi^olus 52 11. 
 Alfred, King S 17. 
 Angelica 10 5. 
 Antony 11 16. 
 Apollo 95, 19 11. 
 Ariel 12 20, 19 1.5. 
 
 Ariosto 9l, 1724, 28, 20 1, 65 36, 
 6712, 682, 14, 6917. 
 Orlando Fiirioso 33 10; 4. 4 : IS 4; 
 15.65 : 1921; 15.87 : 2018-22. 
 Astolfo 20 6. 
 
 Babel 13 14. 
 Bacchuses 21 14. 
 Bacon : 
 
 Advancement of Lear7iing 2.4.2: 
 73 9; 2.5.3:517. 
 
 De Augment. Sclent . 1.3 : 5 17; 
 2. 13 : 73 9. 
 Beaumont and Fletcher 11 10, 45 8, 
 
 50 8. 
 Beaumont, Sir John 42 12. 
 Beethoven 52 3. 
 Berkeley 40 7. 
 Bible 39 10. 
 
 Genesis i o. 9, i o : 13 14. 
 
 Ps. 8. 5 : 40 6. 
 
 I Cor. I 5. 47 : 21 18. 
 
 Heb. 2. 7 : 40 6. 
 Boccaccio 9 14, 54 4. 
 
 Boileau 63 ys. 
 Bojardo: 
 
 Orlando I nnamorato i .3.69 : 106-7. 
 Bradamante IS 4. 
 Brutus 16 9. 
 
 Buckingham, Duke of 4S 8. 
 Banyan 39 19, 404. 
 
 Pilgrim'' s Progress 39 18. 
 Butler 6219, 665. 
 
 Iltidibras i. i. 215-216 : 62 15-16; 
 I. 2. 587-588 : 62 22-25; I. 4. 
 317-318:6217-18; 2.3.261- 
 266 : 63 1-6; 2. 10. 497-498 : 
 4220-21; 3.1.1277-1280:6211- 
 14. 
 Byron : 
 
 Childe Harold canto 4, st. 54 : 9 1 1. 
 Don f nan i. 22 : 63 10-11. 
 
 Caliban 1220, 16 17. 
 Chaucer 6 9, 7 4, 17 8, 19 9, 34 27, 
 65 20, 25, 69 3. 
 Prologue 606-607 : 7 7-8. 
 Monk's Tale 17 15. 
 Squire's Tale 194 : 18 12. 
 Manciple's Tale 6 : 19 10. 
 Coleridge 35 1, 45 8,9, 46 l, 51 10, 
 5313, 584, 7017. 
 Christabcl 1020-23; 13 6; 58 18; 
 
 5824-60 33. 
 Day- Dream 464. 
 Frost at Midnight 32 16-17. 
 Congreve: 
 
 Ode on the Singing of Mrs. Ara- 
 bella Hunt 43 21-27. 
 Cowley 43 14. 
 
 95
 
 96 
 
 INDEX OF FRO PER NAMES. 
 
 Daniel 42 11. 
 
 Dante 13 2, it, is, 23, 16 16, 22, 17 4, 
 5, 11, 15, 33 6, 34 29, 65 18, 67 14, 
 68 3, 16. 
 Itifcrno 25: 13 11; 31.34-S1: 
 14 3-15 3; 1-^. 1-90 : 17 15. 
 Davenant 17 17. 
 
 Goiidibert 17 19, 4223; 3.8,9: 
 42 25-43 4. 
 Donne 6628. 
 Drayton: 
 
 Muse's Ely si II til, Aymfhal 8 : 
 
 368-15. 
 Nymphidia 35 16-36.'i. 
 Dryden 31 lo, 48 4, 496,24, 53 12, 
 54 4, 5711. 
 Absalom and Achitophcl 545- 
 
 562 : 48 9-26. 
 Cymon and Iphigcnia 79-106: 
 
 54 5-55 3. 
 
 Essay of Dramatic Poesy 63 15. 
 The Hind and the Fanther 3. 
 
 1005-1016 : 49 10-22. 
 Prologue to the ^Pilgrim ' of 
 
 Fletcher 62 9-10. 
 Theodore and Honoria 88-99 ■ 
 
 55 10-21. 
 Durer, Alljert 34 4. 
 
 Eleanor, Queen S3. 
 Ellis's Specimens 6 18. 
 
 F'^nelon: 
 
 Tclemachus 40 1. 
 Fen ton: 
 
 Mariamne 31 1-7. 
 Fletcher 665; and see Beaumont. 
 
 Queen of Corinth 3. 2. 1-4 : 11 10. 
 
 Gay 53 J 2. 
 
 Fable Sixth 57 1.3-28. 
 Gesner: 
 
 Death of Abel 2>') 11. 
 
 Gluck 58 22. 
 Goethe: 
 
 Faust 10 12. 
 Goody Two- Shoes 18 19. 
 Gray : 
 
 Elegy 62 5-8, 69 16. 
 
 Hamlet 166. 
 Ilayley 43 12. 
 Ilazlitt: 
 
 Lectures on the English Poets 
 39 14. 
 Hector 25 20. 
 Hervey: 
 
 Meditations 39 17. 
 Hobbes 17 16, 24, 18 14, 195. 
 Homer 69, 826, 172r), 23 13, 25 27, 
 3429, 65 8, 12, 16, 6916. 
 Iliad I. 47 : 9 6; 18. 203-231 : 
 23 16-24 13; 24.468-516 : 263- 
 27 17. 
 
 Imogen 109. 
 Iphigenia 54 3. 
 Iris 23 14. 
 
 Jewell 40 6. 
 Jonson, Ben 5 4. 
 
 An Ode, or Song, etc. 63 19-24. 
 
 Pindaric Ode on the Death oj 
 Sir II. Morison 4 19. 
 
 Keats: 
 
 Isabella st. 27 : 9 16. 
 
 Laing: 
 
 Early Metrical Tales T]t,-6 : 
 621-24; 1611-2,1615-7:626- 
 7 3. 
 T.ear 79, II 17, 169. 
 
 Mai), Queen 35 6. 
 Macbeth 822, 169.
 
 INDEX OF PROPER NAMES, 
 
 97 
 
 Mars 6725. 
 Mercury 6726. 
 
 Milton 97, 19, 11 15, 31 ii, 12, 3426, 
 53 12, 5621, 26, 65 18, 6928. 
 // Penseroso 8:98; 62 : 7 10. 
 U Allegro 139 : 45 13. 
 Lye id OS 10 1 ; 28 : 9 20. 
 On Education 70 1. 
 Paradise Lost 33 6; i . 540 : 40 22; 
 1.576-9:123; 2.626-7:4123- 
 24; 2.637: 12 1; 2. 708-716: 
 12 2; 2.876-882 : 41 16-22; 7. 
 411 : 4125; 7.471-2 : 41 1-2; 
 7. 557 :31ll; 8.61 : 31 12; 8. 
 489 : 31 12; 9. 69-86 : 55 26- 
 56 U. 
 Moli6re 64 4. 
 
 Nimrod 13 2, 12. 
 
 Ossian 39 14. 
 
 Paisiello 52 3. 
 Paltock : 
 
 Peter Wilkins 1223. 
 Patroclus 23 5, 25 16. 
 Percy: 
 
 Friar of Orders Gray 11 11-14. 
 Petrarch 68 28, 69 3. 
 Pope 34 30, 53 12, 664, 5. 
 
 Essay on Criticism 1 53 ; 61 2. 
 
 Rape of the Lock 19 17; 33 8; 
 53 14; 2.7-18 : 53 23-542. 
 Priam 822, 25 18. 
 Prospero 169. 
 Python 19 9. 
 
 Raleigh, Sir Walter 6825, 694. 
 Rembrandt 21 13. 
 Richard 16 9. 
 Richardson : 
 
 Remarks on ^Paradise Lost'' 70 9. 
 Rosamond, Fair 8 2. 
 
 Satan 11 18. 
 Saturn 6725. 
 Shadwell: 
 
 Psyche 46 18; 47 16; 48 4; 
 
 Venus' Song in Act i : 473-9. 
 Shakespeare 826, 11 15, 12 20, 13 7, 
 
 8, 16 10, 18, 173, 1914, 3429, 
 
 352,45 8, 5632,656, 11, 17,684, 
 
 694. 
 Antony and Cleopatra 4.14.3- 
 
 14 : 11 17. 
 As You Like It 3. 2. 103, i ly : 
 
 572. 
 Cymbeline 2. 2. 19 ff. : 10 10. 
 Ilavilet 3. 4. 135 : 16 14. 
 I Henry IV. 4. i. 1 10 : 38 21. 
 King Lear 33 5; 2.4. 192-5: 
 
 11 18; 3. 2. 1-7: 41 3-9; 4- 7-59- 
 
 63 : 711-15. 
 Love' s Labor' s Lost T,. 1. 1 76-1 84 : 
 
 3210. 
 Macbeth 10 11; 33 5; 2. i. 17 : 
 
 3817. 
 Merchant of Venice 5. i. 54: 
 
 1215. 
 Midsummer N^ighfs Dream 2>^ 7; 
 
 3. I. 172 ff. : 62 1. 
 Rape of Lucrecc 65 10. 
 Romeo and fulict 33 8; i. 4. 59 
 
 62 : 35 8-11. 
 Tempest ZZ 9. 
 Troilus and Cressida 3. 3. 222- 
 
 5 : 3125-28. 
 Twelfth Night 2.4. 21-22 : 3323- 
 
 24; 3.2.28-31 : 32 20-22. 
 Venus and Adonis 65 9. 
 Shelley: 
 
 Adonais st. 52 : 12 7-8. 
 
 Defense of Poetry 5. 4 : 5 17; 
 
 13.27-14. 12 : 7026-71 18. 
 Shenstone: 
 
 Schoolmistress sts. 11, 12, 13: 
 
 69 18.
 
 98 
 
 INDEX OF PROPER NAMES. 
 
 Sidney, Sir Philip S 17. 
 
 Sir Eger, Sir Graham, and Sir 
 
 Gray -Steel 6 17. 
 Spenser 13 1, 171,24,28,30, 3424, 
 
 44 20, 45 7, 9, 50 9, 65 21, 68 3, 28, 
 
 6917. 
 Fairy Queen 339; 6827; i. i. 23 : 
 
 4518; 1.3.7:423-6; 1.5.33: 
 
 178; 2.6. 16 : 4 16; 2. 7 : 13 1 ; 
 
 3.12: 18 2; 3.4.33,34: 1912; 
 
 3. 10. 52-60 : 13 1 ; 5. 2. 30: 
 
 44 23. 
 Suckling, Sir John: 
 
 Ballad upon a Wedditig 36 22-27. 
 
 Tartarus 17 7. 
 Theocritus 65 26. 
 
 Tibullus 4. 2. 7-S : 31 12. 
 Timon 169. 
 Titania 62 I. 
 Titian 21 15. 
 Touchstone 5 7. 
 Triton 22 17. 
 
 Una 421. 
 
 Venus 46 18, 6725. 
 Viola 33 21. 
 Virgil 13 23. 
 
 Warner: 
 
 A Kuan's England?), ^i. 53 : 8 .5-6. 
 Weber 58 23. ' 
 Warton, Thomas 44 20.
 
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 particularly additional examples from Shakespeare, Milton, and other 
 familiar sources. 
 
 47 
 
 GINN AND COMPANY Publishers
 
 ENGLISH POETRY (1170-1892) 
 
 Selected by JOHN MATTHEWS MANLY, Professor and Head of the Depart- 
 ment of English in The University of Chicago 
 
 4to, cloth, xxviii + 580 pages, $1.50 
 
 NO other single volume equal in range and price to Manly's "English 
 Poetry" has yet been placed before the teaching public. Professor 
 Manly has brought together not merely as many poems as a teacher 
 could expect his class to read in a course on English literature, but prac- 
 tically all from which any teacher choosing those most in harmony with 
 his own taste and best suited to the special needs of his students would 
 wish to select. The book includes some fifty thousand lines of poetry, 
 ranging in date from the beginning of the Middle-English period to the 
 death of Tennyson. Two principles have determined the choice of the 
 poems, — their intrinsic worth and beauty, and their special significance 
 in the history of English literature. The selections are unencumbered 
 by notes, and historical and critical information has largely been omitted. 
 Explanatory footnotes make clear the extracts from Middle or Early 
 Modern English. 
 
 ENGLISH PROSE (1137-1890) 
 
 By JOHN MATTHEWS MANLY, Professor and Head of the Department of 
 English in The University of Chicago 
 
 4to, cloth, xix-1- 544 pages, J?i.50 
 
 'T^HIS book is a companion volume to Manly's "English Poetry," and, 
 -'- like it, is intended primarily for use in a general survey of English 
 literature. It contains so much material, however, that it will be found 
 well adapted also for use in many special courses. The aim in both of 
 these books has been to afford the teacher an opportunity to make his 
 own selection for class use. Long selections (usually whole pieces) 
 showing sustained power and control of organic structure have been 
 chosen in preference to short bits of writing, however brilliant. 
 
 GINN AND COMPANY Publishers
 
 THE ELEMENTS OF ENGLISH 
 VERSIFICATION 
 
 By James Wilson Bright, Professor of English Literature in the Johns 
 
 Hopkins University, and Raymond I). Milli^k, Instructor 
 
 in English in the University of Missouri 
 
 i2mo, cloth, xii + i66 pages, 80 cents 
 
 As the title indicates, "The Elements of English Versification" 
 deals exclusively with the more external side of poetry, — its metrical 
 form. Part One treats of the individual verse : it shows the nature of 
 rhythm, meter, melody, harmony ; enumerates and illustrates the vari- 
 ous meters ; defines tone color and the different kinds of rime ; and 
 concludes with an important chapter on the scansion of verse. Part 
 Two is concerned with the grouping of verses into paragraphs, stan- 
 zas, and complete poems. An exhaustive index of topics and authors 
 increases the value of the book as a manual of reference. 
 
 The subject is presented in a brief, impersonal style, illuminated at 
 every point by varied and unhackneyed illustration. The treatment 
 is broad and entirely free from controversial matter. 
 
 SHAKSPERE'S VERSIFICATION 
 
 By George II. Browne, of The Browne and Nichols School, Cambridge, Mass. 
 izmo, paper, 34 pages, interleaved, 25 cents 
 
 This treatise includes notes on " Shakspere's Versification," with 
 an appendix on the verse tests and a short descriptive bibliography. 
 
 In speaking of the book, Professor Dowdcn says: '• It deserves 
 to be pointed out to students of this subject as an excellent introduc- 
 tion to the study of Shakespeare's verse." 
 
 PRIMER OF ENGLISH VERSE 
 
 By Hiram Corson, Emeritus Professor of English Literature 
 in Cornell University 
 
 i2mo, cloth, 232 pages, Jsi.oo 
 
 The leading purpose of this volume is to introduce the student to the 
 aesthetic and organic character of English verse. Tennyson's stanzas, 
 the Spenserian stanzas, sonnets, and blank verse are specially treated. 
 
 42a 
 
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