acquisition and practice of the most mechanical art. That study regards both the materials of poetry and the language by which they are to be communicated in a sensible form to others. Study of men in the different conditions of life, and the habit of observing and systematising these observations; study of external nature, so as to mark the peculiarities which escape common eyes; the accustoming the mind to search for resemblances among things different, and to lay them up in the memory as in a treasury; these are assistances which no poet can overlook, and without which the imaginative faculty is deprived of its due nourishment, and of half its power. For even imagination does not strictly create out of nothing; it must be quickened and set in motion by something external, and demands materials on which it can try its processes of change or recombination. All great poets, therefore, have steadily pursued this course of study of nature, both moral and physical; though, after the habit is once formed, these mental operations are carried on almost unconsciously, and the treasures of poetical observation grow upon their possessor, without his being conscious of any effort in their accumulation. A remarkable instance of the attention paid by great poets to the minutest peculiarities of external nature, and of course equally applicable to the study of mental phenomena, is afforded by the case of Sir Walter Scott. Every one knows the graphic truth as well as the wonderful variety of his descriptions of scenery, which, by their selection of every thing that is characteristic, embody the very spirit of the place, and call back to our minds the impression with which we had first viewed it, and which had faded away and become forgotten. It is evident that in such descriptions Scott trusted little to the imagination, as able to compensate the observation of

reality. Mr Morritt mentions, that whilst he was engaged in the composition of Rokeby, he observed him noting down even the peculiar little wild flowers and herbs that accidentally grew round and on the side of a crag near his intended cave of Guy Denzil; and on his saying that he need not have taken the trouble, since daisies, violets, and primroses, would have suited his purpose as well as the humble plants he was examining, the poet replied, "that in nature herself no two scenes are exactly alike, and that whoever copied truly what was before his eyes, would possess the same variety in his descriptions, and exhibit apparently an imagination as boundless as the range of nature in the scenes he recorded; whereas, whoever trusted to imagination would soon find his own mind circumscribed and contracted to a few favourite images, and the repetition of these would, sooner or later, produce that very monotony and barrenness which had always haunted descriptive poetry in the hands of any but the patient worshippers of truth."

The other department of the poet's study relates to the use of the medium through which his ideal creations are to be conveyed to others; in other words, diction, or the choice and arrangement of the words most appropriate to convey the precise shade of meaning, and to convey it divested of all those associations of a low or ludicrous character, which usage sometimes connects with words, and assisted by all the charms of musical sound. All men who seek to command the minds of others through speech must by study learn to apprehend the power and perfect force, as affecting thought, imagination, and passion, of every word which his fellowmen have used for ages as the vivid image of some conception of the soul. They must acquire a perception of the value of words, at once exact, delicate, and passionate.

This careful and fond study of language, however, is peculiarly requisite to the poet, and has been carried to higher perfection by them than by prose writers; "because, in the composition of poetry, the mind, attempered to delight, feels more sensitively the exquisite form into which the material expression of its conception is wrought." The very shackles imposed by metre and rhyme, though they may occasionally tempt an inferior poet into the use of a word which is not the one most apt to express his conception, unquestionably only operate as a stimulus to the great poet to make himself master of all the resources of words which the language supplies, so as to comply with the necessities of rhyme and musical sound without sacrificing any portion of the substance of his conception. Without this thorough command of the whole armament of language, and the utmost patience and perseverance in its use, we may be assured that no poet has ever succeeded in attaining a general and permanent popularity. Verse cannot leap full armed from the brain of the poet. the rudeness of the first conception to the elegance of the last, though they cannot be seen, are undoubtedly many. The ideas must be patiently wrought into shape; words weighed and rejected; shades of meaning of the nicest kind discriminated; associations foreseen and guarded against; and an arrangement of words throughout preserved, which, while it differs from that of prose, never allows the inversions which are admitted in poetry to obscure the meaning. The practice of the greatest poets we know to have been in conformity to these rules. We find Virgil dictating a number of verses in the morning, spending the day in revising, correcting, and reducing them, and comparing himself, as Aulus Gellius mentions, to a she-bear

The steps which lead from

licking her misshapen offspring into shape. We see Petrarch returning day after day to his sonnets, to alter some single word, or make some trifling change in the arrangement of a line. The manuscripts of Ariosto, whose style appears the very perfection of ease, and an almost spontaneous emanation, still exist at Ferrara, and show that many of the favourite passages in the Orlando were written eight times over. Scarcely less attention was bestowed upon the stanzas of the Gerusalemme by Tasso. Milton's study of English speech, and mastery of the artifice of language, as well as the critical care with which he built up "the lofty rhyme," are well known.

He with difficulty and labour hard

Moved on; with difficulty and labour he.

The specimens of Pope's Iliad given in Johnson's Life, exhibiting the successive changes which the lines underwent before they assumed that compact and harmonious form in which they appeared before the public, must be in the recollection of every reader. And we see from the letters of Lord Byron, that the same laborious process of polishing was not disdained even by his impetuous mind. It is indeed scarcely too much to say, that no composition of any length, which has attained a permanent popularity, was ever thrown off at a heat; and that the nearer the work approaches to the appearance of spontaneity, the greater has in general been the extent of the labour which has been employed upon it.

Such being the qualities and habits of mind that make the poet, it may be asked what are the common qualities to be found in all poetry which has permanently commanded the admiration of mankind. Milton has endeavoured to

condense these into a sentence. Poetry, he says, must be "simple, sensuous, passionate."

By the first quality, simplicity, which applies both to the matter and the language, he seems to indicate the necessity of dealing in poetry with the simple elements of human nature; keeping the broad highways of feeling, avoiding affectation of sentiment, over-refinement, or morbid peculiarity of any kind. "It distinguishes poetry from the arduous processes of science labouring towards an end not yet arrived at, and supposes a smooth and finished road on which the reader is to walk onward easily, with streams murmuring by his side, and trees, and flowers, and human dwellings, to make his journey as delightful as the object of it is desirable, instead of having to toil with the pioneers, and painfully to make the road on which others are to travel." And unquestionably it is the fact, that the works of the greatest poets are the simplest, the most level to ordinary apprehension, the most adapted to ordinary sympathies. Homer, in whose works nature is reflected without change, is understood and relished equally by the youth and the man, by nations the most distant from each other both in space and time. Shakspeare, in like manner, in whose works we can detect no subjective influence produced by his own mind, and who seems to range like the universal sun over the provinces of emotion, enlightening all alike, produces the same deep impression on the learned and the unlearned. Both concur in this, that they do not paint the exceptional, but the customary; not the peculiarities, but the common features of humanity; and that they paint

1 Coleridge's Literary Remains, vol. ii. p. 10.