y to discourage their repetition
by all the means in our power. We now see clearly, however, how the case
stands;--and, making up our minds, though with the most sincere pain and
reluctance, to consider him as finally lost to the good cause of poetry,
shall endeavour to be thankful for the occasional gleams of tenderness
and beauty which the natural force of his imagination and affections
must still shed over all his productions,--and to which we shall ever
turn with delight, in spite of the affectation and mysticism and
prolixity, with which they are so abundantly contrasted.

Long habits of seclusion, and an excessive ambition of originality, can
alone account for the disproportion which seems to exist between this
author's taste and his genius; or for the devotion with which he has
sacrificed so many precious gifts at the shrine of those paltry idols
which he has set up for himself among his lakes and his mountains.
Solitary musings, amidst such scenes, might no doubt be expected to
nurse up the mind to the majesty of poetical conception,--(though it is
remarkable, that all the greater poets lived or had lived, in the full
current of society):--But the collision of equal minds,--the admonition
of prevailing impressions--seems necessary to reduce its redundancies,
and repress that tendency to extravagance or puerility, into which the
self-indulgence and self-admiration of genius is so apt to be betrayed,
when it is allowed to wanton, without awe or restraint, in the triumph
and delight of its own intoxication. That its flights should be graceful
and glorious in the eyes of men, it seems almost to be necessary that
they should be made in the consciousness that men's eyes are to behold
them,--and that the inward transport and vigour by which they are
inspired, should be tempered by an occasional reference to what will be
thought of them by those-ultimate dispensers of glory. An habitual and
general knowledge of the few settled and permanent maxims, which form
the canon of general taste in all large and polished societies--a
certain tact, which informs us at once that many things, which we still
love and are moved by in secret, must necessarily be despised as
childish, or derided as absurd, in all such societies--though it will
not stand in the place of genius, seems necessary to the success of its
exertions; and though it will never enable any one to produce the higher
beauties of art, can alone secure the talent which d