human
Can you write a poem for me in the style of Georg Ebers?
assistant
Sure, here's a poem in the style of Georg Ebers:
  resemble me, but when, misled by that appearance, I have thought
to appeal to something in common, and unburthen my inmost soul to
to a greater distance have the points of sympathy been withdrawn.
find within our own thoughts the chasm of an insufficient void,
born anew within another's; if we feel, we would that another's
nerves should vibrate to our own, that the beams of their eyes
should kindle at once and mix and melt into our own, that lips of
within us which, from the instant that we live, more and more
thirsts after its likeness. It is probably in correspondence with
are ineffectual and metaphorical. Most words are so--No help!] a
paradise, which pain, and sorrow, and evil dare not overleap. To
this we eagerly refer all sensations, thirsting that they should
and delicate peculiarities which we have delighted to cherish and
is the invisible and unattainable point to which Love tends; and
to attain which, it urges forth the powers of man to arrest the
faintest shadow of that, without the possession of which there
is no rest nor respite to the heart over which it rules. Hence in
singing to you alone. Sterne says that, if he were in a desert,
What are changes of empires, the wreck of dynasties, with the
miracle, we admire not, because it is so miraculous. It is well
that we are thus shielded by the familiarity of what is at once
so certain and so unfathomable, from an astonishment which would
otherwise absorb and overawe the functions of that which is its
object.
and the rivers; the grass, and the flowers, and the variety of
the forms and masses of the leaves of the woods, and the colours
which attend the setting and the rising sun, and the hues of the
atmosphere, turbid or serene, these things not before existing,
Life--that which includes all.
The most refined abstractions of logic conduct to a view of life,
in us. It strips, as it were, the painted curtain from this scene
universe of external things is 'such stuff as dreams are made
of.' The shocking absurdities of the popular philosophy of mind
and matter, its fatal consequences in morals, and their violent
imagining to himself annihilation; existing but in the future and
It is absurd to enter into a long recapitulation of arguments
found in Sir William Drummond's Academical Questions.
process of reasoning, which does not conduct inevitably to the
conclusion which has been stated.
What follows from the admission? It establishes no new truth, it
reformer in political and ethical questions to leave, a vacancy.
It reduces the mind to that freedom in which it would have acted,
Let us recollect our sensations as children. What a distinct and
are now no longer so. But that is not the point of comparison on
which I mean to insist. We less habitually distinguished all that
or as if the surrounding universe were absorbed into their being.
precede, or accompany, or follow an unusually intense and vivid
apprehension of life. As men grow up this power commonly decays,
and they become mechanical and habitual agents. Thus feelings and
The view of life presented by the most refined deductions of the
intellectual philosophy, is that of unity. Nothing exists but as
reasoning, the existence of distinct individual minds, similar to
them. It is difficult to find terms adequate to express so subtle
apprehension of distinction.
The relations of these remain unchanged; and such is the material
produced, or what agencies distinct from life have acted or act
has been,--Religion. Yet, that the basis of all things cannot be,
perceive. It is said also to be the cause. But cause is only a
word expressing a certain state of the human mind with regard to
the manner in which two thoughts are apprehended to be related to
popular philosophy employs itself upon this great question, they
need only impartially reflect upon the manner in which thoughts
It has been the persuasion of an immense majority of human beings
particle of these sustaining the smallest diminution. They have
clung to the idea that sensibility and thought, which they have
distinguished from the objects of it, under the several names
of spirit and matter, is, in its own nature, less susceptible of
division and decay, and that, when the body is resolved into its
elements, the principle which animated it will remain perpetual
other forms.
watchfully establish a discrimination between words and thoughts.
light we derive from a sustained and comprehensive view of its
component parts, which may enable, us to assert, with certainty,
that we do or do not live after death.
The examination of this subject requires that it should be stript
It has been asserted, indeed, that as goodness and justice are to
make every sensitive being who does not deserve punishment, happy
same time, that the animating power survives the body which it
has animated, by laws as independent of any supernatural agent as
By the word death, we express that condition in which natures
resembling ourselves apparently cease to be that which they were.
sensations and apprehensions, we no longer participate in them.
of inexhaustible melancholy, whose shadow eclipses the brightness
he cannot meet again. The organs of sense are destroyed, and the
heaps of putrid clay and crumbling bones hold together? When you
can discover where the fresh colours of the faded flower abide,
or the music of the broken lyre, seek life among the dead. Such
The natural philosopher, in addition to the sensations common
to all men inspired by the event of death, believes that he sees
with more certainty that it is attended with the annihilation of
sentiment and thought. He observes the mental powers increase and
drunkenness and disease will either temporarily or permanently
are convincing evidences that so soon as the organs of the body
are subjected to the laws of inanimate matter, sensation, and
perception, and apprehension, are at an end.  It is probable that
of which the rest of the universe is composed, and which ceases
to exist so soon as those parts change their position with regard
substance, which permeates, and is the cause of, the animation of
differ from all others. Each of these is subject to change and
to decay, and to conversion into other forms. Yet the difference
substances be an argument for the prolongation of the existence
of one and not the other, when the existence of both has arrived
at their apparent termination? To say that fire exists without
manifesting any of the properties of fire, such as light, heat,
etc., or that the principle of life exists without consciousness,
distortion of language, the affirmative of the dispute. To say
false, but which, were it true, annihilates all hope of existence
hopes and fears of men. Suppose, however, that the intellectual
period, beyond which we have no experience of its existence, such
Have we existed before birth? It is difficult to conceive the
is, the relations between certain elementary particles of matter
undergo a change, and submit to new combinations. For when we use
to allege the possibility of an opinion as a proof of its truth.
Does it see, hear, feel, before its combination with those organs
without those ideas which sensation alone can communicate? If we
have not existed before birth; if, at the period when the parts
of our nature on which thought and life depend, seem to be woven
together; if there are no reasons to suppose that we have existed
then there are no grounds for supposition that we shall continue
to exist after our existence has apparently ceased.  So far as
It is said that it, is possible that we should continue to exist
desire to be persuaded. This desire to be for ever as we are; the
The first law which it becomes a Reformer to propose and support,
abolition of the punishment of death.
It is sufficiently clear that revenge, retaliation, atonement,
Omitting these remoter considerations, let us inquire what, DEATH
to think and feel after the dissolution of the body, has been the
of what I may be permitted to term the modern Academy, by showing
causes and nature of sensation, renders probable the affirmative
of a proposition, the negative of which it is so difficult to
conceive, and the popular arguments against which, derived from
essence which is the medium and receptacle of objects.
The popular system of religion suggests the idea that the mind,
is a certain analogy, not wholly absurd, between the consequences
consequences which are conjectured to ensue from the discipline
and order of his internal thoughts, as affecting his condition in
together with the multitude of independent agencies which affect
the opinions, the conduct, and the happiness of individuals, and
produce determinations of the will, and modify the judgement, so
as to produce effects the most opposite in natures considerably
similar. These are those operations in the order of the whole of
nature, tending, we are prone to believe, to some definite mighty
To compel a person to know all that can be known by the dead
concerning that which the living fear, hope, or forget; to plunge
and evil with which Nature seems to have clothed every form of
individual existence, is to inflict on him the doom of death.
it is singularly inadequate.
Firstly, Persons of energetic character, in whom, as in men who
of suffering virtue, as the warning of a culprit. The multitude,
to be the authors of such flattering emotions, as they experience
they make no distinctive between the motives which incited the
case lose their sympathy, which it ought to be their chief object
strength in maintaining those sanctions by which the parts of the
possible, the ends for which it is instituted.
Secondly,--Persons of energetic character, in communities not
modelled with philosophical skill to turn all the energies which
conviction. But the coarseness of organization, peculiar to men
capable of committing acts wholly selfish, is usually found to
be associated with a proportionate insensibility to fear or pain.
crime. In cases of murder or mutilation, this feeling is almost
universal. In those, therefore, whom this exhibition does not
awaken to the sympathy which extenuates crime and discredits the
law which restrains it, it produces feelings more directly at war
with that of the death and torture of others. It is manifest that
invade it.
feeling, engrafted upon superstition and confirmed by habit, at
last loses sight of the only object for which it may be supposed
to have been implanted, and becomes a passion and a duty to be
pursued and fulfilled, even to the destruction of those ends to
liability of irremediable actions is attached, according to the
notions of the vulgar.
an enemy, are the sources from which the enormous superstitions
implied in the words cited have arisen.]
Nothing is more clear than that the infliction of punishment in
general, in a degree which the reformation and the restraint of
those who transgress the laws does not render indispensable, and
Governments which derive their institutions from the existence of
The spectators who feel no abhorrence at a public execution, but
rather a self-applauding superiority, and a sense of gratified
It is an axiom in mental philosophy, that we can think of nothing
remember nothing, we can foresee nothing.  The most astonishing
combinations of poetry, the subtlest deductions of logic and
mathematics, are no other than combinations which the intellect
call a cause does to what we call effect, were never subjects of
sensation, and yet the laws of mind almost universally suggest,
according to the various disposition of each, a conjecture,
a persuasion, or a conviction of their existence. The reply is
simple; these thoughts are also to be included in the catalogue
of existence; they are modes in which thoughts are combined; the
Thoughts, or ideas, or notions, call them what you will, differ
from each other, not in kind, but in force. It has commonly been
supposed that those distinct thoughts which affect a number of
persons, at regular intervals, during the passage of a multitude
of other thoughts, which are called REAL or EXTERNAL OBJECTS,
are totally different in kind from those which affect only a few
persons, and which recur at irregular intervals, and are usually
life; and if nothing more were expressed by the distinction, the
philosopher might safely accommodate his language to that of the
vulgar. But they pretend to assert an essential difference, which
of their disagreement consists in the variety and irregularity of
altogether distinct. By considering all knowledge as bounded by
in this comprehensive and synthetical view, exclude the subtlest
analysis of its modifications and parts.
A scale might be formed, graduated according to the degrees
of a combined ratio of intensity, duration, connexion, periods of
nicely shadowed distinctions would be observed, from the faintest
We are intuitively conscious of our own existence, and of that
connexion in the train of our successive ideas, which we term our
possible ideas; the law, according to which these deductions are
drawn, is called analogy; and this is the foundation of all our
inferences, from one idea to another, inasmuch as they resemble
each other.
We see trees, houses, fields, living beings in our own shape, and
considered relatively to human identity, for the existence of the
We do not attend sufficiently to what passes within ourselves. We
assume entire opinions; and in the expression of those opinions,
entire phrases, when we would philosophize. Our whole style of
in sciences regarding external objects. As in these, let us also,
authorities upon which any assertions regarding it are supported.
Metaphysics may be defined as an inquiry concerning those things
belonging to, or connected with, the internal nature of man.
It is said that mind produces motion; and it might as well have
been said, that motion produces mind.
with difficulty visit the intricate and winding chambers which it
some haunted pile, and dares not look behind. The caverns of the
possible to be where we have been, vitally and indeed--if, at the
experience,--if the passage from sensation to reflection--from a
state of passive perception to voluntary contemplation, were not
Most of the errors of philosophers have arisen from considering
the human being in a point of view too detailed and circumscribed
ought to consider the mind of man and the universe as the great
whole on which to exercise our speculations. Here, above all,
verbal disputes ought to be laid aside, though this has long been
peculiar to their individual nature, a sufficiently general
it resembles, or differs from, that of others, I am by no means
I omit the general instances of delusion in fever or delirium, as
over. What is the connexion of sleeping and of waking?
intervals of two or more years, the same precise dream.  It was
not so much what is ordinarily called a dream; the single image,
unconnected with all other images, of a youth who was educated at
youth, without the three places where I dreamed of him presenting
connexion of which with the obscure parts of my own nature, I
have been irresistibly impressed. I have beheld a scene which has
has haunted my thoughts, at intervals, with the pertinacity of an
singly could have awakened, from both.
But the most remarkable event of this nature, which ever occurred
a friend, in the neighbourhood of that city, engaged in earnest
and interesting conversation. We suddenly turned the corner of a
in one among many plashy meadows, inclosed with stone walls; the
That great science which regards nature and the operations of
the human mind, is popularly divided into Morals and Metaphysics.
of distinct names to its ideas; the former regards simply the
all pleasure, since it cannot be equally felt by all sensitive
purpose, metaphysical science will be treated merely so far as a
source of negative truth; whilst morality will be considered as a
is incumbent on us to inquire, before we can arrive at any firm
conclusions as to the conduct which we ought to pursue in the
thoughts, from which these actions flow, are originally combined.
This object is not merely the quantity of happiness enjoyed by
individuals as sensitive beings, but the mode in which it should
be distributed among them as social beings. It is not enough, if
such a coincidence can be conceived as possible, that one person
or class of persons should enjoy the highest happiness, whilst
another is suffering a disproportionate degree of misery. It is
necessary that the happiness produced by the common efforts, and
preserved by the common care, should be distributed according to
the just claims of each individual; if not, although the quantity
being.
The disposition in an individual to promote this object is called
Justice and benevolence result from the elementary laws of the
human mind.
The regulation of this influence is the object of moral science.
instrumental to that purpose, is called virtue. And benevolence,
or the desire to be the author of good, united with justice, or
an apprehension of the manner in which that good is to be done,
constitutes virtue.
But wherefore should a man be benevolent and just? The immediate
It is inquired, for what reason a human being should engage
in procuring the happiness, or refrain from producing the pain of
requires proof of that system of conduct being such as will most
be no obligation without an obliger. Virtue is a law, to which it
and superstition.
In fact, no person can be BOUND or OBLIGED, without some power
preceding to bind and oblige. If I observe a man bound hand and
.      .      .      .      .       .       .
It remains to be stated in what manner the sensations which
constitute the basis of virtue originate in the human mind; what
are the laws which it receives there; how far the principles of
mind allow it to be an attribute of a human being; and, lastly,
what is the probability of persuading mankind to adopt it as a
universal and systematic motive of conduct.
old, has a very imperfect consciousness of the existence of other
emotion, its nurse or its mother suffering acute pain, it is
attributable rather to ignorance than insensibility. So soon as
acquires an active power, the empire of these tendencies becomes
The inhabitant of a highly civilized community will more acutely
sympathize with the sufferings and enjoyments of others, than
the inhabitant of a society of a less degree of civilization. He
who shall have cultivated his intellectual powers by familiarity
with the highest specimens of poetry and philosophy, will usually
of manual labour. Every one has experience of the fact, that to
The mind thus acquires, by exercise, a habit, as it were, of
perceiving and abhorring evil, however remote from the immediate
objects, is that faculty of human nature on which every gradation
have blunted or rendered torpid; disinterested benevolence is the
or stability to the social state of man. Virtue is thus entirely
a refinement of civilized life; a creation of the human mind; or,
rules contained within itself, of the feelings suggested by the
relations established between man and man.
to Carthage, and Epicharis sustained the rack silently, in the
torments of which she knew that she would speedily perish, rather
received, does not enter into the account. Let it not be objected
The benevolent propensities are thus inherent in the human mind.
We are impelled to seek the happiness of others. We experience
a satisfaction in being the authors of that happiness. Everything
led by our benevolent propensities to regard every human being
indifferently with whom we come in contact. They have preference
only with respect to those who offer themselves most obviously
to our notice. Human beings are indiscriminating and blind; they
will avoid inflicting pain, though that pain should be attended
with eventual benefit; they will seek to confer pleasure without
calculating the mischief that may result. They benefit one at the
There is a sentiment in the human mind that regulates benevolence
to distribute any means of pleasure which benevolence may suggest
beings; pleasure and pain affect them alike.
of religious error, which it seems useful to refute.
First, it is inquired, 'Wherefore should a man be benevolent and
just?' The answer has been given in the preceding chapter.
The writer of a philosophical treatise may, I imagine, at this
under the name of religions, have in various ages and countries
prevailed among mankind. Besides that if, as these reasoners have
the greatness of the personal calamity which the author willingly
My neighbour, presuming on his strength, may direct me to perform
My action, if modified by his menaces, can no degree participate
in virtue. He has afforded me no criterion as to what is right or
affixing any penalty to any particular action, but that is not
immoral because such penalty is affixed. Nothing is more evident
than that the epithet of virtue is inapplicable to the refraining
consequences attached to its performance.
Some usurper of supernatural energy might subdue the whole globe
to his power; he might possess new and unheard-of resources for
and protracted to an infinite duration. Still the 'will of the
lawgiver' would afford no surer criterion as to what actions were
The internal influence, derived from the constitution of the mind
To attain an apprehension of the importance of this distinction,
let us visit, in imagination, the proceedings of some metropolis.
of government and law are regularly employed in their offices and
are classed under the general appellation of marriage, education,
glance, are similar one to the other.
which we have been contemplating, has a peculiar frame of mind,
a vital influence on the happiness of others and his own, so much
Those little, nameless, unremembered acts
Of kindness and of love,
as well as those deadly outrages which are inflicted by a look,
a word--or less--the very refraining from some faint and most
been already said, derives its origin from without. These are the
appreciating the general effects of their peculiarities, and in
cultivating the habit of acquiring decisive knowledge respecting
the tendencies arising out of them in particular cases, that the
most important part of moral science consists. The deepest abyss
of these vast and multitudinous caverns, it is necessary that we
should visit.
legislature created by the general representation of the past
feelings of mankind--imperfect as it is from a variety of causes,
his opinion, which he often hopes he has dispassionately secured
from all contagion of prejudice and vulgarity, would be found, on
from which he vehemently dissents. Internally all is conducted
otherwise; the efficiency, the essence, the vitality of actions,
derives its colour from what is no ways contributed to from any
cankered, or distorted, or inflated, yet retains those qualities
which essentially divide it from all others; so that hemlock
continues to be poison, and the violet does not cease to emit its
We consider our own nature too superficially. We look on all that
The period which intervened between the birth of Pericles and the
the subsequent destinies of civilized man, the most memorable in
the history of the world. What was the combination of moral and
political circumstances which produced so unparalleled a progress
retrograde,--are problems left to the wonder and conjecture of
posterity. The wrecks and fragments of those subtle and profound
such as we, in our presumption, assume to be the models of ideal
truth and beauty, and to which no artist of modern times can
which it is said to have produced, whether they be attributed to
our own times; and if, indeed, the melody of their compositions
have been something wonderful, and wholly beyond conception.
Their poetry seems to maintain a very high, though not so
fragments of the Greek lyric poets equivalent to the sublime and
chivalric sensibility of Petrarch.--But, as a poet. Homer must be
could tempt any one to embark in the misty ocean of his dark and
extravagant fiction.
their poetry to that of any other period! So that had any other
fell.
In physical knowledge Aristotle and Theophrastus had already--no
doubt assisted by the labours of those of their predecessor whom
they criticize--made advances worthy of the maturity of science.
The astonishing invention of geometry, that series of discoveries
doctrines of those great men, in comparison with the timid maxims
Their political and religious institutions are more difficult to
bring into comparison with those of other times. A summary idea
may be formed of the worth of any political and religious system,
The modern nations of the civilized world owe the progress which
they have made--as well in those physical sciences in which they
the latter, it can scarcely be said that they have yet equalled
so to speak, the rivers flowing from those immortal fountains.
And though there seems to be a principle in the modern world,
which, should circumstances analogous to those which modelled
the intellectual resources of the age to which we refer, into so
harmonious a proportion, again arise, would arrest and perpetuate
lasting improvement of the condition of man--though justice and
and poets; it is the history of men, compared with the history of
dared to show them precisely as they were. Barthelemi cannot
be denied the praise of industry and system; but he never forgets
Greeks precisely as they were; they seem all written for children
the absolute and unconditional equality of all human beings, or
from the institutions of chivalry, or from a certain fundamental
difference of physical nature existing in the Celts, or from a
moral, political, and metaphysical science, and perhaps in every
other art and science.
The women, thus degraded, became such as it was expected they
extremely beautiful; at least there was no such disproportion in
the attractions of the external form between the female and male
sex among the Greeks, as exists among the modern Europeans. They
were certainly devoid of that moral and intellectual loveliness
with which the acquisition of knowledge and the cultivation of
sentiment animates, as with another life of overpowering grace,
the lineaments and the gestures of every form which they inhabit.
labyrinths.
Let it not be imagined that because the Greeks were deprived of
resembles it; and instinctively fills up the interstices of the
imperfect image, in the same manner as the imagination moulds and
senses is no longer all that is sought in sexual connexion. It
soon becomes a very small part of that profound and complicated
nature receives from civilization, for man never ceases to be a
social being. The sexual impulse, which is only one, and often a
small part of those claims, serves, from its obvious and external
derives a strength not its own from the accessory circumstances
other causes. In the susceptibility of the external senses there
is probably no important difference.
society of man present us with slow improvement in this respect.
The Roman women held a higher consideration in society, and were
esteemed almost as the equal partners with their husbands in the
The dialogue entitled The Banquet was selected by the translator
as the most beautiful and perfect among all the works of Plato.
of speculation, is, indeed, the greatest repository of important
truths of all the works of Plato. This, perhaps, is because it is
such rulers, and the laws by which such a selection is made, must
Plato is eminently the greatest among the Greek philosophers, and
proceeded those emanations of moral and metaphysical knowledge,
on which a long series and an incalculable variety of popular
a man. Lord Bacon is, perhaps, the only writer, who, in these
it is this faculty which raises him far above Aristotle, whose
genius, though vivid and various, is obscure in comparison with
that of Plato.
The dialogue entitled the Banquet, is called [word in Greek], or
poet, on the occasion of his gaining the prize of tragedy at the
years after it had taken place, to a companion who was curious to
he is represented in this piece, as well as from a passage in the
According to one mode of regarding those two classes of mental
in Greek], or the principle of synthesis, and has for its objects
the similitudes of things.  Reason is to the imagination as the
instrument to the agent, as the body to the spirit, as the shadow
Poetry, in a general sense, may be defined to be 'the expression
ever-changing melody. But there is a principle within the human
by an internal adjustment of the sounds or motions thus excited
to the impressions which excite them. It is as if the lyre could
accommodate its chords to the motions of that which strikes them,
accommodate his voice to the sound of the lyre. A child at play
by itself will express its delight by its voice and motions; and
awakened it; it will be the reflected image of that impression;
and as the lyre trembles and sounds after the wind has died away,
duration of the effect, to prolong also a consciousness of the
cause. In relation to the objects which delight a child, these
treasure of expressions; and language, gesture, and the imitative
harmony. The social sympathies, or those laws from which, as from
the moment that two human beings coexist; the future is contained
will of a social being is determined to action, inasmuch as he is
subject to the laws of that from which it proceeds. But let us
dismiss those more general considerations which might involve an
inquiry into the principles of society itself, and restrict our
view to the manner in which the imagination is expressed upon its
In the youth of the world, men dance and sing and imitate natural
rhythm or order. And, although all men observe a similar, they
observe not the same order, in the motions of the dance, in the
order or rhythm belonging to each of these classes of mimetic
representation, from which the hearer and the spectator receive
an intenser and purer pleasure than from any other: the sense
of an approximation to this order has been called taste by modern
express the influence of society or nature upon their own minds,
perpetuates their apprehension, until the words which represent
them as the storehouse of axioms common to all knowledge. In the
infancy of society every author is necessarily a poet, because
language itself is poetry; and to be a poet is to apprehend the
true and the beautiful, in a word, the good which exists in the
relation, subsisting, first between existence and perception, and
But poets, or those who imagine and express this indestructible
order, are not only the authors of language and of music, of the
dance, and architecture, and statuary, and painting; they are the
inventors of the arts of life, and the teachers, who draw into a
certain propinquity with the beautiful and the true, that partial
called religion. Hence all original religions are allegorical, or
the present, and his thoughts are the germs of the flower and the
in the eternal, the infinite, and the one; as far as relates to
Language, colour, form, and religious and civil habits of action,
actions and passions of our internal being, and is susceptible
of more various and delicate combinations, than colour, form, or
motion, and is more plastic and obedient to the control of that
faculty of which it is the creation. For language is arbitrarily
produced by the imagination and has relation to thoughts alone;
but all other materials, instruments and conditions of art, have
relations among each other, which limit and interpose between
and musicians, although the intrinsic powers of the great masters
two performers of equal skill will produce unequal effects from a
gross opinions of the vulgar usually conciliates, together with
that which belonged to them in their higher character of poets,
any excess will remain.
still narrower, and to determine the distinction between measured
verse is inadmissible in accurate philosophy.
Sounds as well as thoughts have relation both between each other
An observation of the regular mode of the recurrence of harmony
in the language of poetical minds, together with its relation to
composition as includes much action: but every great poet must
inevitably innovate upon the example of his predecessors in the
exact structure of his peculiar versification. The distinction
to conceive. He rejected the measure of the epic, dramatic, and
lyrical forms, because he sought to kindle a harmony in thoughts
varied pauses of his style. Cicero sought to imitate the cadence
of his periods, but with little success. Lord Bacon was a poet.
of his philosophy satisfies the intellect; it is a strain which
distends, and then bursts the circumference of the reader's mind,
nor even as their words unveil the permanent analogy of things
by images which participate in the life of truth; but as their
periods are harmonious and rhythmical, and contain in themselves
A poem is the very image of life expressed in its eternal truth.
There is this difference between a story and a poem, that a story
nature, as existing in the mind of the Creator, which is itself
the moths of just history; they eat out the poetry of it. A story
thought. And thus all the great historians, Herodotus, Plutarch,
its highest degree, they made copious and ample amends for their
subjection, by filling all the interstices of their subjects with
Poetry is ever accompanied with pleasure: all spirits on which it
of his peers: it must be impanelled by Time from the selectest of
musician, who feel that they are moved and softened, yet know not
system which is the column upon which all succeeding civilization
human character; nor can we doubt that those who read his verses
persevering devotion to an object, were unveiled to the depths in
or less specious, has deified its peculiar errors; Revenge is the
which cover without concealing the eternal proportions of their
beauty. An epic or dramatic personage is understood to wear them
concealed by its accidental vesture, but that the spirit of its
form shall communicate itself to the very disguise, and indicate
have chosen to exhibit the beauty of their conceptions in its
naked truth and splendour; and it is doubtful whether the alloy
of costume, habit, &c., be not necessary to temper this planetary
The whole objection, however, of the immorality of poetry rests
and subjugate one another. But poetry acts in another and diviner
contemplated them as memorials of that gentle and exalted content
pains and pleasures of his species must become his own. The great
strengthens the faculty which is the organ of the moral nature
of man, in the same manner as exercise strengthens a limb. A poet
moral aim, and the effect of their poetry is diminished in exact
Homer and the cyclic poets were followed at a certain interval
by the dramatic and lyrical poets of Athens, who flourished
contemporaneously with all that is most perfect in the kindred
that will less repugnant to the dictates of the beautiful and the
which has rendered this epoch memorable above all others, and the
those few great specimens of the Athenian drama which have been
preserved to us, it is indisputable that the art itself never was
as at Athens. For the Athenians employed language, action, music,
of the poet's conception are employed at once. We have tragedy
without religion and solemnity. Religious institution has indeed
been usually banished from the stage. Our system of divesting the
and unchanging expression, is favourable only to a partial and
inharmonious effect; it is fit for nothing but a monologue, where
mimicry. The modern practice of blending comedy with tragedy,
though liable to great abuse in point of practice, is undoubtedly
as in KING LEAR, universal, ideal, and sublime. It is perhaps the
latter, should be considered as restoring the equilibrium. KING
LEAR, if it can sustain this comparison, may be judged to be the
most perfect specimen of the dramatic art existing in the world;
in spite of the narrow conditions to which the poet was subjected
neglected by Shakespeare; such as the establishing a relation
more important, and more is lost than gained by the substitution
of the rigidly-defined and ever-repeated idealisms of a distorted
passion.
But I digress.--The connexion of scenic exhibitions with the
been imputed to the drama as an effect, begins when the poetry
The drama at Athens, or wheresoever else it may have approached
as mirrors in which the spectator beholds himself, under a thin
disguise of circumstance, stript of all but that ideal perfection
this high exercise of them into the tumult of familiar life: even
longer cherish it as the creation of their choice. In a drama of
the highest order there is little food for censure or hatred; it
teaches rather self-knowledge and self-respect. Neither the eye
nor the mind can see itself, unless reflected upon that which it
But in periods of the decay of social life, the drama sympathizes
the great masterpieces of antiquity, divested of all harmonious
accompaniment of the kindred arts; and often the very form
CATO is a specimen of the one; and would it were not superfluous
to cite examples of the other! To such purposes poetry cannot be
drama is the reign of Charles II, when all forms in which poetry
to be expressed upon them. Comedy loses its ideal universality:
forth new food, which it devours in secret.
The drama being that form under which a greater number of modes
renewed, if men should arise capable of bringing back the drama
to its principles. And this is true with respect to poetry in its
of sweetness; whilst the poetry of the preceding age was as a
meadow-gale of June, which mingles the fragrance all the flowers
of the field, and adds a quickening and harmonizing spirit of its
correlative with that softness in statuary, music and the kindred
be imputed. An equal sensibility to the influence of the senses
and the affections is to be found in the writings of Homer and
to pleasure; and, therefore, it is corruption. It begins at the
survives. At the approach of such a period, poetry ever addresses
are capable of receiving: it is ever still the light of life; the
than the remnant of their tribe. But corruption must utterly have
at once of its own and of social renovation.  And let us not
circumscribe the effects of the bucolic and erotic poetry within
the limits of the sensibility of those to whom it was addressed.
finely organized, or born in a happier age, may recognize them as
the world.
of the selectest forms of manners and of nature, and to have
their own condition, whilst it should bear a general one to the
universal constitution of the world. But we judge from partial
evidence, and we judge perhaps partially Ennius, Varro, Pacuvius,
highest, and Virgil in a very high sense, a creator. The chosen
Ovid, and generally the other great writers of the Virgilian age,
Rome, seemed to follow, rather than accompany, the perfection of
political and domestic society. The true poetry of Rome lived in
its institutions; for whatever of beautiful, true, and majestic,
conceived; which, copied into the imaginations of men, become as
systems: except that we protest, on the ground of the principles
already established, that no portion of it can be attributed to
the poetry they contain.
It is probable that the poetry of Moses, Job, David, Solomon, and
At a certain period after the prevalence of a system of opinions
founded upon those promulgated by him, the three forms into which
apotheosis, and became the object of the worship of the civilized
The crow makes wing to the rooky wood,
Good things of day begin to droop and drowse,
And night's black agents to their preys do rouze.
But mark how beautiful an order has sprung from the dust and
and swiftness.
victory, and blended themselves in a new fabric of manners and
slaves of the will of others: lust, fear, avarice, cruelty, and
fraud, characterized a race amongst whom no one was to be found
capable of CREATING in form, language, or institution. The moral
anomalies of such a state of society are not justly to be charged
it most expeditiously. It is unfortunate for those who cannot
It was not until the eleventh century that the effects of the
poetry of the Christian and chivalric systems began to manifest
themselves.  The principle of equality had been discovered and
applied by Plato in his Republic, as the theoretical rule of the
mode in which the materials of pleasure and of power, produced by
to be determined only by the sensibility of each, or the utility
to result to all. Plato, following the doctrines of Timaeus and
poetry and wisdom of antiquity. The incorporation of the Celtic
nations with the exhausted population of the south, impressed
upon it the figure of the poetry existing in their mythology and
institutions. The result was a sum of the action and reaction of
The abolition of personal slavery is the basis of the highest
became a religion, the idols of whose worship were ever present.
It was as if the statues of Apollo and the Muses had been endowed
and heavenly, and a paradise was created as out of the wrecks of
Eden. And as this creation itself is poetry, so its creators were
how the gentleness and the elevation of mind connected with these
judgement of the vulgar, and the order of the great acts of the
of our own age, have celebrated the dominion of love, planting
as it were trophies in the human mind of that sublimest victory
over sensuality and force. The true relation borne to each other
by the sexes into which human kind is distributed, has become
less misunderstood; and if the error which confounded diversity
with inequality of the powers of the two sexes has been partially
owe this great benefit to the worship of which chivalry was the
law, and poets the prophets.
The poetry of Dante may be considered as the bridge thrown over
system, of which by a strange and natural antithesis, it has been
mistake to suppose that he could ever have been intended for the
anguish on an enemy, these things are evil; and, although venial
in a slave are not to be forgiven in a tyrant; although redeemed
by much that ennobles his defeat in one subdued, are marked by
all that dishonours his conquest in the victor. Milton's Devil as
nature as colours upon a single pallet, and arranged them in the
composition of his great picture according to the laws of epic
those which have arisen and decayed upon the earth, commentators
Homer was the first and Dante the second epic poet: that is,
the second poet, the series of whose creations bore a defined and
developing itself in correspondence with their development. For
Lucretius had limed the wings of his swift spirit in the dregs of
a single condition of epic truth. Milton was the third epic poet.
Aeneid, still less can it be conceded to the Orlando Furioso, the
Dante and Milton were both deeply penetrated with the ancient
religion of the civilized world; and its spirit exists in their
poetry probably in the same proportion as its forms survived in
the unreformed worship of modern Europe. The one preceded and the
was the first religious reformer, and Luther surpassed him rather
shone forth from republican Italy, as from a heaven, into the
darkness of the benighted world. His very words are instinct with
inmost naked beauty of the meaning never exposed. A great poem
is a fountain for ever overflowing with the waters of wisdom and
delight; and after one person and one age has exhausted all its
divine effluence which their peculiar relations enable them to
The age immediately succeeding to that of Dante, Petrarch, and
Boccaccio, was characterized by a revival of painting, sculpture,
superstructure of English literature is based upon the materials
of Italian invention.
But let us not be betrayed from a defence into a critical history
former sense, whatever strengthens and purifies the affections,
Undoubtedly the promoters of utility, in this limited sense, have
poets, and copy the sketches of their creations into the book of
common life. They make space, and give time. Their exertions are
limits due to the superior ones. But whilst the sceptic destroys
gross superstitions, let him spare to deface, as some of the
French writers have defaced, the eternal truths charactered upon
the imaginations of men. Whilst the mechanist abridges, and the
political economist combines labour, let them beware that their
modern England, to exasperate at once the extremes of luxury and
want. They have exemplified the saying, 'To him that hath, more
have become poorer; and the vessel of the state is driven between
effects which must ever flow from an unmitigated exercise of the
calculating faculty.
It is difficult to define pleasure in its highest sense; the
definition involving a number of apparent paradoxes. For, from an
which is inseparable from the sweetest melody. The pleasure that
is in sorrow is sweeter than the pleasure of pleasure itself. And
The production and assurance of pleasure in this highest sense
is true utility. Those who produce and preserve this pleasure are
poet. The others, even Voltaire, were mere reasoners.] and their
monuments of ancient sculpture had been handed down to us; and if
the intervention of these excitements, have been awakened to the
We have more moral, political and historical wisdom, than we know
in morals, government, and political economy, or at least, what
is wiser and better than what men now practise and endure. But we
eaten more than we can digest. The cultivation of those sciences
which have enlarged the limits of the empire of man over the
is to be attributed the abuse of all invention for abridging and
The functions of the poetical faculty are two-fold; by one it
creates new materials of knowledge and power and pleasure; by the
them according to a certain rhythm and order which may be called
Poetry is indeed something divine. It is at once the centre and
that from which all spring, and that which adorns all; and that
which, if blighted, denies the fruit and the seed, and withholds
from the barren world the nourishment and the succession of the
corruption. What were virtue, love, patriotism, friendship--what
calculation dare not ever soar?  Poetry is not like reasoning, a
power to be exerted according to the determination of the will. A
whether it is not an error to assert that the finest passages of
poetry are produced by labour and study. The toil and the delay
recommended by critics, can be justly interpreted to mean no more
limitedness of the poetical faculty itself; for Milton conceived
the Orlando Furioso. Compositions so produced are to poetry what
a child in the mother's womb; and the very mind which directs the
origin, the gradations, or the media of the process.
regarding our own mind alone, and always arising unforeseen
and departing unbidden, but elevating and delightful beyond all
of its object. It is as it were the interpenetration of a diviner
The enthusiasm of virtue, love, patriotism, and friendship,
is essentially linked with such emotions; and whilst they last,
self appears as what it is, an atom to a universe. Poets are not
only subject to these experiences as spirits of the most refined
organization, but they can colour all that they combine with the
evanescent hues of this ethereal world; a word, a trait in the
representation of a scene or a passion, will touch the enchanted
chord, and reanimate, in those who have ever experienced these
emotions, the sleeping, the cold, the buried image of the past.
Poetry thus makes immortal all that is best and most beautiful in
no portal of expression from the caverns of the spirit which they
eternity and change; it subdues to union under its light yoke,
all irreconcilable things. It transmutes all that it touches, and
by wondrous sympathy to an incarnation of the spirit which it
breathes: its secret alchemy turns to potable gold the poisonous
waters which flow from death through life; it strips the veil of
familiarity from the world, and lays bare the naked and sleeping
beauty, which is the spirit of its forms.
All things exist as they are perceived; at least in relation to
impressions. And whether it spreads its own figured curtain,
or withdraws life's dark veil from before the scene of things, it
inhabitants of a world to which the familiar world is a chaos.
It reproduces the common universe of which we are portions and
minds by the recurrence of impressions blunted by reiteration.
It justifies the bold and true words of Tasso: Non merita nome di
institutor of human life be comparable to that of a poet.  That
he is the wisest, the happiest, and the best, inasmuch as he is
a poet, is equally incontrovertible: the greatest poets have been
fortunate of men: and the exceptions, as they regard those who
possessed the poetic faculty in a high yet inferior degree, will
'there sitting where we dare not soar', are reprehensible. Let
us assume that Homer was a drunkard, that Virgil was a flatterer,
to cite living poets, but posterity has done ample justice to the
the contemporary calumnies against poetry and poets; consider how
motives, and judge not, lest ye be judged.
these are the necessary conditions of all mental causation, when
mental effects are experienced unsusceptible of being referred to
correlative with its own nature and its effects upon other minds.
without being durable, a poet becomes a man, and is abandoned to
the sudden reflux of the influences under which others habitually
himself obnoxious to calumny, when he neglects to observe the
circumstances under which these objects of universal pursuit and
flight have disguised themselves in one another's garments.
But there is nothing necessarily evil in this error, and thus
of poets.
to be stunned, by the Theseids of the hoarse Codri of the day.
rather than confound.
The first part of these remarks has related to poetry in its
The second part will have for its object an application of these
principles to the present state of the cultivation of poetry, and
as surpass beyond comparison any who have appeared since the last
correspondence with that spirit of good of which they are
the ministers. But even whilst they deny and abjure, they are yet
their own soul. It is impossible to read the compositions of the
most celebrated writers of the present day without being startled
comprehensive and all-penetrating spirit, and they are themselves
it is less their spirit than the spirit of the age. Poets are the
gigantic shadows which futurity casts upon the present; the words
to battle, and feel not what they inspire; the influence which is