poet is a continuous under-current of feeling; it is everywhere present, but seldom anywhere as a separate excitement. I was wont boldy to affirm, that it would be scarcely more difficult to push a stone out from the pyramids with the 5 bare hand, than to alter a word, or the position of a word, in Milton or Shakespeare, (in their most important works at least,) without making the author say something else, or something worse, than he does say. One great distinction, I appeared to myself to see plainly, between, even the characIo teristic faults of our elder poets, and the false beauty of the moderns. In the former, from DONNE to COWLEY, we find the most fantastic out-of-the-way thoughts, but in the most pure and genuine mother English; in the latter, the most obvious thoughts, in language the most fantastic and 15 arbitrary. Our faulty elder poets sacrificed the passion and passionate flow of poetry, to the subtleties of intellect, and to the starts of wit; the moderns to the glare and glitter of a perpetual, yet broken and heterogeneous imagery, or rather to an amphibious something, made up, half of image, and 20 half of abstract* meaning. The one sacrificed the heart to the head; the other both heart and head to point and drapery.

The reader must make himself acquainted with the general style of composition that was at that time deemed 25 poetry, in order to understand and account for the effect produced on me by the SONNETS, the MONODY at MATLOCK, and the HOPE, of Mr. Bowles; for it is peculiar to original genius to become less and less striking, in proportion to its success in improving the taste and judgement of its con30 temporaries. The poems of WEST, indeed, had the merit of chaste and manly diction, but they were cold, and, if I

* I remember a ludicrous instance in the poem of a young tradesman :

"No more will I endure love's pleasing pain,
Or round my heart's leg tie his galling chain."

may so express it, only dead-coloured; while in the best of Warton's there is a stiffness, which too often gives them the appearance of imitations from the Greek. Whatever relation therefore of cause or impulse Percy's collection of Ballads may bear to the most popular poems of the present 5 day; yet in the more sustained and elevated style, of the then living poets, Bowles and Cowper* were, to the best of my knowledge, the first who combined natural thoughts with natural diction; the first who reconciled the heart with the head.

ΤΟ

It is true, as I have before mentioned, that from diffidence in my own powers, I for a short time adopted a laborious and florid diction, which I myself deemed, if not absolutely vicious, yet of very inferior worth. Gradually, however, my practice conformed to my better judgement; and the com- 15 positions of my twenty-fourth and twenty-fifth years (ex. gr. the shorter blank verse poems, the lines, which are now adopted in the introductory part of the VISION in the present collection, in Mr. Southey's Joan of Arc, 2nd book, Ist edition, and the Tragedy of REMORSE) are not more below my 20 present ideal in respect of the general tissue of the style than those of the latest date. Their faults were at least a remnant of the former leaven, and among the many who have done me the honor of putting my poems in the same class with those of my betters, the one or two, who have pre- 25

* Cowper's Task was published some time before the Sonnets of Mr. Bowles; but I was not familiar with it till many years afterwards. The vein of satire which runs through that excellent poem, together with the sombre hue of its religious opinions, would probably, at that time, have prevented its laying any strong hold on my affections. The love of nature seems to have led Thompson to a chearful religion; and a gloomy religion to have led Cowper to a love of nature. The one would carry his fellow-men along with him into nature; the other flies to nature from his fellow-men. In chastity of diction however, and the harmony of blank verse, Cowper leaves Thompson immeasurably below him; yet still I feel the latter to have been the born poet.

tended to bring examples of affected simplicity from my volume, have been able to adduce but one instance, and that out of a copy of verses half ludicrous, half splenetic, which I intended, and had myself characterized, as sermoni propiora.

Every reform, however necessary, will by weak minds be carried to an excess, that itself will need reforming. The reader will excuse me for noticing, that I myself was the first to expose risu honesto the three sins of poetry, one or the other of which is the most likely to beset a young writer. 10 So long ago as the publication of the second number of the monthly magazine, under the name of NEHEMIAH HIGGINBOTTOM, I contributed three sonnets, the first of which had for its object to excite a good-natured laugh at the spirit of doleful egotism, and at the recurrence of favorite phrases, with the double defect of being at once trite and licentious. The second, on low, creeping language and thoughts, under the pretence of simplicity. And the third, the phrases of which were borrowed entirely from my own poems, on the indiscriminate use of elaborate and swelling language and 20 imagery. The reader will find them in the note* below, and SONNET I.

15

PENSIVE at eve, on the hard world I mused,

And my poor heart was sad; so at the MOON

I gazed, and sighed, and sighed; for ah how soon
Eve saddens into night! mine eyes perused

With tearful vacancy the dampy grass
That wept and glitter'd in the paly ray:
And I did pause me on my lonely way

And mused me on the wretched ones that pass
O'er the bleak heath of sorrow. But alas!
Most of myself I thought! when it befel,
That the soothe spirit of the breezy wood
Breath'd in mine ear: All this is very well,
But much of ONE thing, is for No thing good."
Oh my poor heart's INEXPLICABLE SWELL!

SONNET II.

OH I do love thee, meek SIMPLICITY!

For of thy lays the lulling simpleness

Goes to my heart, and soothes each small distress,
Distress tho' small, yet haply great to me.

will I trust regard them as reprinted for biographical purposes, and not for their poetic merits. So general at that time, and so decided was the opinion concerning the

'Tis true on Lady Fortune's gentlest pad
I amble on; and yet I know not why
So sad I am! but should a friend and I
Frown, pout and part, then I am very sad.
And then with sonnets and with sympathy
My dreamy bosom's mystic woes I pall;
Now of my false friend plaining plaintively,
Now raving at mankind in general;

But whether sad or fierce, 'tis simple all,
All very simple, meek SIMPLICITY !

SONNET III.

AND this reft house is that, the which he built, Lamented Jack! and here his malt he pil'd, Cautious in vain! these rats, that squeak so wild, Squeak not unconscious of their father's guilt. Did he not see her gleaming thro' the glade! Belike 'twas she, the maiden all forlorn. What tho' she milk no cow with crumpled horn, Yet, aye she haunts the dale where erst she stray'd: And aye, beside her stalks her amorous knight ! Still on his thighs their wonted brogues are worn, And thro' those brogues, still tatter'd and betorn, His hindward charms gleam an unearthly white. Ah! thus thro' broken clouds at night's high Noon Peeps in fair fragments forth the full-orb'd harvest-moon! The following anecdote will not be wholly out of place here, and may perhaps amuse the reader. An amateur performer in verse expressed to a common friend a strong desire to be introduced to me, but hesitated in accepting my friend's immediate offer, on the score that "he was, he must acknowledge, the author of a confounded severe epigram on my ancient mariner, which had given me great pain.' I assured my friend that, if the epigram was a good one, it would only increase my desire to become acquainted with the author, and begg'd to hear it recited: when, to my no less surprise than amusement, it proved to be one which I had myself some time before written and inserted in the Morning Post.

To the author of the Ancient Mariner.

Your poem must eternal be,

Dear sir! it cannot fail,
For 'tis incomprehensible,

And without head or tail.

characteristic vices of my style, that a celebrated physician (now, alas! no more) speaking of me in other respects with his usual kindness to a gentleman, who was about to meet me at a dinner party, could not however resist giving him 5 a hint not to mention the "House that Jack built" in my presence, for "that I was as sore as a boil about that sonnet;" he not knowing, that I was myself the author of it,

CHAPTER II

Supposed irritability of men of Genius-Brought to the test of facts-Causes and Occasions of the charge-Its Injustice.

I HAVE often thought, that it would be neither uninstructive nor unamusing to analyze, and bring forward into distinct 10 consciousness, that complex feeling, with which readers in general take part against the author, in favor of the critic; and the readiness with which they apply to all poets the old sarcasm of Horace upon the scribblers of his time: "Genus irritabile vatum." A debility and 15 dimness of the imaginative power, and a consequent necessity of reliance on the immediate impressions of the senses, do, we well know, render the mind liable to superstition and fanaticism. Having a deficient portion of internal and proper warmth, minds of this class seek in the 20 crowd circum fana for a warmth in common, which they do not possess singly. Cold and plegmatic in their own nature, like damp hay, they heat and inflame by co-acervation; or like bees they become restless and irritable through the increased temperature of collected multitudes. Hence the 25 German word for fanaticism, (such at least was its original import,) is derived from the swarming of bees, namely, Schwärmen, Schwärmerei. The passion being in an inverse proportion to the insight, that the more vivid, as this the less distinct; anger is the inevitable consequence. The ab