self, though marked as government property, may walk about his fields uninjured, from the usual simplicity of his life, and from very ignorance of what he has undergone; but those who never possessed the real wisdom of his simplicity, will hardly retain the virtue; and as in less healthy men, a turn for the worst taste of his reverie would infallibly be symptomatic of a weak state of stomach rather than of a fine strength of fancy, so in men of less intellect, the imitation of his smaller simplicities is little else but an announcement of that vanity and weakness of mind which is open to the first skilful corrupter that wishes to make use of it.

With regard to the language in which Mr. Wordsworth says that poetry should be written, his mistake seems to be this-that instead of allowing degrees and differences in what is poetical, he would have all poetry to be one and the same in point of style, and no distinction allowed between natural and artificial associations. Nobody will contend with him that the language of nature is the best of all languages, and that the poet is at his height when he can be most fanciful and most feeling in expressions the most neighbourly and intelligible; but the poet may sometimes choose to show his art in a manner more artful, and appealing to more particular associations than what are shared by the world at large, as those of classical readers for instance. It is

true, by so doing, he narrows his dominion, and gives up the glory of a greater and more difficult sway; but he still rules us by a legitimate title, and is still a poet. In the one instance he must have all the properties of the greatest of his profession-fancy, feeling, knowledge; in the other, he requires less feeling, and for knowledge may substitute learning: a great inferiority, no doubt, but still only differing in degree; for learning is but the knowledge of books, as knowledge is the learning of things. Mr. Wordsworth, to illustrate what he means, quotes the following sonnet of Gray, and says, that "the only part of it which is of any value, is the lines printed in Italics."*

In vain to me the smiling mornings shine,

And reddening Phœbus lifts his golden fire:
The birds in vain their amorous descant join,
Or cheerful fields resume their green attire.
These ears, alas! for other notes repine,

A different object do these eyes rèquire,
My lonely anguish melts no heart but mine,
And in my breast the imperfect joys expire;
Yet morning smiles the busy race to cheer,
And new-born pleasure brings to happier men;
The fields to all their wonted tribute bear;

To warm their little loves the birds complain.

We repeat this sonnet with the less hesitation, because it does not appear in the usual editions of Gray, though one of the best and most original of his compositions. It was written on the death of his friend Richard West.

I fruitless mourn to him that cannot hear,

And weep the more because I weep in vuin.

For the lines not marked in Italics much certainly cannot be said; but their chief fault, in point of association, and as specimens of the secondary species of poetry, is, that they are misplaced; otherwise, in a piece professedly dealing in metaphorical and classical allusions, they would still be poetical, because still fanciful, and because still referring to natural emotions. But the fairest mode of settling the question, is to instance distinct pieces of the respective kinds, not those in which natural and artificial language interfere with each other, and only serve to show the great superiority of the former over the latter. If Shakspeare, for example, had written only those two lines, one in the Merchant of Venice, where he speaks of moonlight,

How sweet the moonlight sleeps upon this bank,

And the other in Lear, where the poor old heartbursting king, finding his trembling fingers too weak for him, and yet not forgetting the habitual politeness of his rank, turns to somebody and says,

Pray you undo this button;-thank you, Sir

he would have left to all posterity two exquisite proofs of his natural greatness in poetry, the one for fancy, the other for feeling. But on the other band, Collins has left us little or nothing written in a natural language; almost the whole of his thoughts are turned upon personifications and learned abstractions, and expressed in what may be called the learned language of poetry; yet, to say nothing of his Odes on the Passions and Manners, there would be sufficient in that on the Poetical Character to stamp him a true poet; and Mr. Wordsworth, by the way, with an evident feeling to this effect, has written an ode to his memory. It is the same with what Dryden calls the "admirable Grecisins" of Milton.* Milton could write with a natural greatness, though not so well as Shakspeare; but he chose also at times to be more artificial, and if he has been so too often, it only shows that his genius had less natural greatness about it, and a smaller consciousness of resources, not that he had then put off his poetry altogether. Had he heard, in his time, of the project for excluding all language and all associations from poetry, but those of natural passion and humanity, he would have spoken with new feelings of the cessation of those ancient oracles that have breathed out upon us a second inspiration; he would have lamented that

Essay on Satire, prefixed to the Juvenal.

Apollo from his shrine

Should no more divine,

With hollow shriek the steep of Delphos leaving;

and have told us, with a share in the general how

sorrow,

The lonely mountains o'er,
And the resounding shore,

A voice of weeping heard, and loud lament:
From haunted spring and dale,

Edg'd with poplar pale,

The parting Genius is with sighing sent;
With flow'r-inwoven tresses torn

The Nymphs in twilight shade of tangled thicket

mourn.

If it were merely to keep such verses as these fresh for posterity, it would be worth while to protest against the exclusion of one species of poetry, merely because it has an elder and nobler brother. But the truth is, the exclusion would do harm to the cause of poetry in general; it would cut off, as we have seen, a direct portion of the skilful and delightful from poetryit would hinder a number of subjects from being treated poetically, that are now recommendable to the world by the process of versification-it would rid us of one set of pretenders, only to inundate us with another much more insufferable-the pretenders to simplicity; and, finally, it would