was not in this sense a great poet; for the bent, the characteristic
power of his mind, lay the clean contrary way; namely, in representing
things as they appear to the indifferent observer, stripped of prejudice
and passion, as in his Critical Essays; or in representing them in the
most contemptible and insignificant point of view, as in his Satires; or
in clothing the little with mock-dignity, as in his poems of Fancy; or in
adorning the trivial incidents and familiar relations of life with the
utmost elegance of expression, and all the flattering illusions of
friendship or self-love, as in his Epistles. He was not then distinguished
as a poet of lofty enthusiasm, of strong imagination, with a passionate
sense of the beauties of nature, or a deep insight into the workings of
the heart; but he was a wit, and a critic, a man of sense, of observation,
and the world, with a keen relish for the elegances of art, or of nature
when embellished by art, a quick tact for propriety of thought and
manners as established by the forms and customs of society, a refined
sympathy with the sentiments and habitudes of human life, as he felt them
within the little circle of his family and friends. He was, in a word, the
poet, not of nature, but of art; and the distinction between the two, as
well as I can make it out, is this--The poet of nature is one who, from
the elements of beauty, of power, and of passion in his own breast,
sympathises with whatever is beautiful, and grand, and impassioned in
nature, in its simple majesty, in its immediate appeal to the senses, to
the thoughts and hearts of all men; so that the poet of nature, by the
truth, and depth, and harmony of his mind, may be said to hold communion
with the very soul of nature; to be identified with and to foreknow and to
record the feelings of all men at all times and places, as they are liable
to the same impressions; and to exert the same power over the minds of his
readers, that nature does. He sees things in their eternal beauty, for he
sees them as they are; he feels them in their universal interest, for he
feels them as they affect the first principles of his and our common
nature. Such was Homer, such was Shakspeare, whose works will last as long
as nature, because they are a copy of the indestructible forms and
everlasting impulses of nature, welling out from the bosom as from a
perennial spring, or stamped upon the senses by the hand of their maker.
The power of the im