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production of as great immediate pleasure in each part, as is compatible
with the largest possible sum of pleasure on the whole. Now this
definition applies equally to painting and music as to poetry; and in
truth the term poetry is alike applicable to all three. The vehicle alone
constitutes the difference; and the term "poetry" is rightly applied by
eminence to measured words, only because the sphere of their action is far
wider, the power of giving permanence to them much more certain, and
incomparably greater the facility, by which men, not defective by nature
or disease, may be enabled to derive habitual pleasure and instruction
from them. On my mentioning these considerations to a painter of great
genius, who had been, from a most honourable enthusiasm, extolling his own
art, he was so struck with their truth, that he exclaimed, "I want no
other arguments;--poetry, that is, verbal poetry, must be the greatest; all
that proves final causes in the world, proves this; it would be shocking
to think otherwise!"--And in truth, deeply, O! far more than words can
express, as I venerate the Last Judgment and the Prophets of Michel Angelo
Buonarotti,--yet the very pain which I repeatedly felt as I lost myself in
gazing upon them, the painful consideration that their having been painted
in _fresco_ was the sole cause that they had not been abandoned to all the
accidents of a dangerous transportation to a distant capital, and that the
same caprice, which made the Neapolitan soldiery destroy all the exquisite
masterpieces on the walls of the church of _Trinitado Monte_, after the
retreat of their antagonist barbarians, might as easily have made vanish
the rooms and open gallery of Raffael, and the yet more unapproachable
wonders of the sublime Florentine in the Sixtine Chapel, forced upon my
mind the reflection: How grateful the human race ought to be that the
works of Euclid, Newton, Plato, Milton, Shakespeare, are not subjected to
similar contingencies,--that they and their fellows, and the great, though
inferior, peerage of undying intellect, are secured;--secured even from a
second irruption of Goths and Vandals, in addition to many other
safeguards, by the vast empire of English language, laws, and religion
founded in America, through the overflow of the power and the virtue of my
country;--and that now the great and certain works of genuine fame can only
cease to act for mankind, when men themselves cease to be men, or wh