lips of the poet, to whom we commit our weakness as well as our wisdom. He is also freed, in a great measure, from that obligation of consistency with himself, which is imposed on all other writers. If the sentiments he expresses are contradictory—if one ode, or one elegy, be utterly at variance with its predecessor—yet, if in each instance he expounds what we ourselves have thought, or felt, or can be made to feel, he escapes without censure. In discoursing on human life, we should hold it discreditable in the graver moralist, if in one page of his writings he should depict our existence as a fruitless toil or weary idleness, as a scarce mitigated grievance, replete with pain and disappointment, and yet in some future page break forth in exclamations of delight at this admirable state of being, so happily devised, so full of activity, so gay with hope, so rich in affections! But the poet is allowed, after this very fashion, "to change his hand and check the measure." Of such conflicting representations as these, neither can, of course, express what is generally and permanently true of human life, but both portray an actual and veritable condition of our changeful minds. Both, therefore, belong to the poet. The very truth he seeks is to be found in this versatility of thought; he is pledged to the follies, he must be faithful to the inconsistencies, of mankind.
We may here, perhaps, be asked why—if poetry is to be described as that species of literature which has intellectual pleasure and excitement for its very purpose—why the novel—which is certainly written for our amusement, and cannot often be accused of having any other object in view—should not be classed under the head of poetry? To us it seems that the novel is not only divested of the form of verse, and is not only less select in the objects presented by it to the imagination, but that it depends for its power over us on a species of interest incompatible with what is most peculiar and refined in the substance itself of poetry. The interest of a novel depends on a strong excitement of our curiosity. We are carried from event to event with breathless haste, and our agitation continually increases to know the results of those entangled and conflicting circumstances in which we ourselves seem, for the time, to be involved. If the work has not this predominant interest of a story, it may be a good book for many purposes, but it is no novel. Now, this excitement of a keen impetuous curiosity, cannot possibly be united either with that deep impassioned thought, or with that subtle play of fancy, which are the main boast and glory of the poet. If the novelist pause to reflect and refine—if he would throw the mind back upon itself, or task it with discursive efforts of the imagination—we grow impatient, and our impatience is just in proportion to the success with which he had engaged us in that busy, stirring, complicated scene, which, like another real life, he was creating around us. He cannot expect, after having thus disturbed the repose of his reader, to have him in that "still and quiet time," when the mind is free to take those varied and delicate movements which, in such quick succession, the verse of a master spirit is capable of impressing on it. When the poet undertakes to conduct us along the course of some narrative, we have no such haste or trepidation. If we find ourselves borne with violence, it is on the wings of passion; we are not tormented by a craving curiosity in the plot, which is tempered and subdued, and made subordinate to other modes of excitement. When we travel with the minstrel we have abundant leisure on our hands; we have no place to reach, or are in no haste to reach it; we pause, we loiter, we wander, wherever and as long as he pleases. The very music of his verse delays and detains the spirit. We linger as we listen, and rather fear to go too fast than are impatient to proceed. The novel, therefore, appears to be marked out from the poem, not only by its prosaic form, and a coarser selection of topics, but by its dependence on a species of interest incompatible with that mood of reflection so necessary to the enjoyment of poetic thought. But here, as in all such distinctions, the two provinces are seen to be separate, but it is utterly impossible to draw the boundary line between them. In the poem, the interest of a narrative may so predominate that the work shall be little more than a tale in verse; while in the novel that interest may be so subdued, and the page so
