arts to be enveloped in mysterious and
incomprehensible language, as if it was thought necessary that even the
terms should correspond to the idea entertained of the instability and
uncertainty of the rules which they expressed.

To speak of genius and taste as any way connected with reason or common
sense, would be, in the opinion of some towering talkers, to speak like a
man who possessed neither, who had never felt that enthusiasm, or, to use
their own inflated language, was never warmed by that Promethean fire,
which animates the canvas and vivifies the marble.

If, in order to be intelligible, I appear to degrade art by bringing her
down from her visionary situation in the clouds, it is only to give her a
more solid mansion upon the earth. It is necessary that at some time or
other we should see things as they really are, and not impose on
ourselves by that false magnitude with which objects appear when viewed
indistinctly as through a mist.

We will allow a poet to express his meaning, when his meaning is not well
known to himself, with a certain degree of obscurity, as it is one source
of the sublime. But when, in plain prose, we gravely talk of courting
the muse in shady bowers, waiting the call and inspiration of genius,
finding out where he inhabits, and where he is to be invoked with the
greatest success; of attending to times and seasons when the imagination
shoots with the greatest vigour, whether at the summer solstice or the
equinox, sagaciously observing how much the wild freedom and liberty of
imagination is cramped by attention to established rules, and how this
same imagination begins to grow dim in advanced age, smothered and
deadened by too much judgment. When we talk such language, or entertain
such sentiments as these, we generally rest contented with mere words, or
at best entertain notions not only groundless, but pernicious.

If all this means what it is very possible was originally intended only
to be meant, that in order to cultivate an art, a man secludes himself
from the commerce of the world, and retires into the country at
particular seasons; or that at one time of the year his body is in better
health, and consequently his mind fitter for the business of hard
thinking than at another time; or that the mind may be fatigued and grow
confused by long and unremitted application; this I can understand. I
can likewise believe that a man eminent when young for possessing
poetical imagina