search to find a parallel to. Our literature has it not. And this
acknowledgment, gratulation, triumph, which friends and circles, and the
confined literary world of that day in this country could furnish, a whole
age, and a whole country, and a whole world, the extended republic of
letters, confirm.

In the judgment of England, in the eighteenth century, the reputation of
Pope may be called the most dazzling in English literature. It was a
nearer sun than Dryden, Milton, Shakspeare; as for Spenser and Chaucer,
they were little better than fixed stars.

Great revolutions in the state of the heavens and of astronomical science
have ensued. To say nothing of new luminaries that have come into birth,
from the bosom of "chaos and unoriginal night," either we have wheeled
round upon Shakspeare, or he upon us, in a surprising manner; the orb of
Milton enlarges day by day; cheerily we draw large accessions of the
gentlest light on Spenser; and old Father Geoffrey and we are sensibly
approximating.

We have taken Pope's counsel. We have with some good-will reverted to
Nature, and so we come nearer to the poets of Nature. There may have been
other causes at work. The change has involved more than was just a
depreciation of Pope himself: as if he were an accomplished artist in a
limited sphere of art, and no poet. We dissent _toto corde et toto
coelo_. He was a spirit, muse-born, a hero of half celestial extraction,
and so by all rule a demigod.

His age confined him. A poet is not independent of his age. He may ride on
the van of the tide--no more. And we see that the greatest poets are but
the most entire expression of the age, taken at the best. How shall it be
otherwise? Their age is mother and nurse to them. And what air does a
poet respire, but the circulating, fanning, living, breeze of sympathy? He
more than all beings receives into his soul the souls of other men. So he
thrives and grows; and shall he not be a partaker in his age?

In an age thus to be described, that it refines instead of creating, and
that, in particular, it imposes the refinement elaborated by social, and
indeed aristocratical manners, upon genius, which should only refine
itself by tenderness and sanctity, and by love dwelling evermore in the
inextinguishable paradise of the beautiful--he who was fitted to his age
by much of his mind, by his wit, by fancy given more fully than
imagination, by inclination to the _limae labor_, by the susceptibilit