les, but the prose writer more frequently to illustrate a meaning, while the allusions of the poet are more frequently employed to deepen an impression. His object is to increase the sentiment, whatever it may be—love, or terror, or admiration—which is due to the subject of his verse, by
mingling with it a sentiment of the like nature derived from some other source. Thus, to take the simplest of all examples, a rose and the young damsel who gathers it are two very different objects; the one cannot aid us in understanding the other; but both originate the feeling of beauty in an eminent degree, and therefore the poet, from time immemorial, has mingled them together in his strain. He contrives that they should reflect their beauty on each other. Even impressions that are but remotely analogous are made to assimilate, as when the stability of the inanimate rock is introduced to the mind in connexion with the moral constancy of some redoubtable hero. To this play of imagination there is no limit. Objects the most distant and various, animate and inanimate, spiritual and material, of nature, art, or history, are all brought together to serve the occasions of the poet. They are assembled by a word—they contribute to the desired effect—they are dispersed in an instant. They are presented in just one aspect, and that often only for a moment, the very propriety of their introduction frequently depending on this evanescent manner of their appearance. The poet's eye, in that glance of his from earth to heaven, catches at the remotest objects, seizing them in that one attitude in which they harmonize. We must follow it with something of the same quickness, for if we look long and slowly at the images presented to us, an incongruous or absurd effect may sometimes be produced; as we may have had occasion to observe, when some bungling or malicious critic has first spoiled the poet's allusion, by bringing it out in grosser characters than it would bear, and then held up to ridicule his own damaged and distorted copy.
This peculiarity in the end of poetry not only justifies the musical form of its composition, and thus, its imaginative style of writing, but accounts, also, for an especial license given to it in the very thought or sentiment which it invests with music and imagery. We often hear it remarked of a certain strain of thought, that it is fit for poetry, but out of place elsewhere. Now, how is this? Do those who use this language intend to insult the poet with a privilege to be irrational? Hardly so. But the poet is an artist who, working in language as other artists work in stone or metal, has it for his professed object to embody in his verse the various forms of human thought. If, therefore, a sentiment is natural, pleasing, and commonly felt—if it takes a recognised place among the moods, or even the caprices of humanity—it is a fair topic for poetry, though its reasonableness may not admit of very severe examination. We oblige the poet, in the sentiments he utters, to adhere to reality rather than to reason. He is bound to describe us accurately; we do not make him responsible for the rationality of all our sentiments. What if, in the ardour of his imagination, he forgets, or seems to forget, some very sober and undoubted truth, the oblivion will be pardoned him if it be the natural result of his imaginative mood. In such cases it is the poet's knowledge not to know. Science, for example, teaches us to regard all the events of the material world as linked together in an unfailing series of cause and effect—the most vagrant and subtle of the elements are reduced, we know, beneath the control of a severe and immutable legislation—the very wind may no longer blow as it lists—and the clouds themselves, that used to be the very playthings of chance, are fashioned and freighted as the law directs, and are piloted to their destination along a destined course. All nature is bound down on her ceaseless and inevitable wheel. But what if the poet will take a quite different view of the moving but inanimate scene? What if he grows indignant at the bondage, at the perpetual toil and servitude, imposed upon all nature? What if he will loose her, and have her free, and will assign to the elements a spontaneous movement, like that of man? What if the summer-cloud pauses at her own leisure on the mountain-top, or the "river wanders at her own sweet will?" the sentiment, though it would be quite astounding and ridiculous from the man of science, falls with grace from the
