In poetry what multitudes of "pieces" crowd the corners of our newspapers and magazines, and even find their way to a more permanent form, to which it is impossible to give any more generic name than "pieces of poetry;" pieces, indeed, whereof no whole could be constructed! If they happen to be of fourteen lines, they are "sonnets." There are "songs" that could never be sung. There are "lines," and "fragments," "dramatic scenes," "epical fragments;" every device that can be suggested to avoid a matured, preconsidered form.
Yet it may be safely said, that almost every great poetical genius has contemplated, were it only as a day-dream, the undertaking of some great and formal work; and the respect with which such ideas and undertakings are always regarded, when based upon adequate powers, are a proof of a real existence and value in forms, even at this late day. How many epics have been dreamed of by poets, and despaired of! How many have tested their powers by a dramatic effort that could not stand the test! What added splendor and importance have invested even the too pedantic form of the classical French school!
We have spoken of the German as the critical literature. We have also, in the literary history of this nation, the remarkable fact, of a most careful and successful attention to literary forms, existing contemporaneously with the purest development of critical science. The admirers of Goethe would even perhaps go so far as to say, that in him we find a union of the most successful cultivation of literary form in later times, with the greatest critical judgment and skill the world has ever seen applied to literary matters. However this may be, a short consideration of what he accomplished must necessarily have a bearing on our subject.
Taking his works collectively, we are first called upon to remark a plain line of division between those that have a clear, easily understood, and pre-arranged plan or form, and others that are not only destitute to common eyes of any such outward form, but have an incoherence and formlessness, which the admirers of the poet have for the most part
