SECOND SERIES

THE POET

A moody child and wildly wise
Pursued the game with joyful eyes,
Which chose, like meteors, their way,
And rived the dark with private ray :

They overleapt the horizon's edge,
Searched with Apollo's privilege;

Through man, and woman, and sea, and star,

Saw the dance of nature forward far;

Through worlds, and races, and terms, and times,

Saw musical order, and pairing rhymes.

VOL. II.

X

Olympian bards who sung

Divine ideas below,

Which always find us young,

And always keep us so.

ESSAY I.

THE POET.

THOSE who are esteemed umpires of taste are often persons who have acquired some knowledge of admired pictures or sculptures, and have an inclination for whatever is elegant; but if you inquire whether they are beautiful souls, and whether their own acts are like fair pictures, you learn that they are selfish and sensual. Their cultivation is local, as if you should rub a log of dry wood in one spot to produce fire, all the rest remaining cold. Their knowledge of the fine arts is some study of rules and particulars, or some limited judgment of colour or form, which is exercised for amusement or for show. It is a proof of the shallowness of the doctrine of beauty, as it lies in the minds of our amateurs, that men seem to have lost the perception of the instant dependence of form upon soul. philosophy.

There is no doctrine of forms in our We were put into our bodies, as fire is put into a pan, to be carried about; but there is no accurate adjustment between the spirit and the organ, much less is the latter the germination of the former. So in regard to other forms, the intellectual men do