la gar host' akamantos
e Notou e Borea tis
kumata eurei ponto
bant' epionta t' idoi
houto de ton kadmogene
trephei; to d' auxei biotou
poluponon hoste pelagos
kretion.+ Soph. Trachin.]

[Footnote 69: Of this the reader will find a noble instance in
Pindar's first Pythian Ode, where he employs from the verse
beginning +nausiphoretais d' adrasea+, &c. to the end of the stanza,
one of the happiest and most natural illustrations that is to be
met with either in the works of Pindar, or in those of any Poet
whatever. The abrupt address to Phoebus, when he applies the
metaphor, is peculiarly beautiful.]

It is likewise necessary that the Poet should take care in the higher
species of the Ode, to assign to every object that precise degree of
colour, as well as that importance in the arrangement of sentiments
which it seems peculiarly to demand. The same images which would be
considered as capital strokes in some pieces can be admitted only as
secondary beauties in others; and we might call in question both the
judgment and the imagination of that Poet who attempts to render a faint
illustration adequate to the object, by clothing it with profusion of
ornament. A defect likewise either in the choice, or in the disposition,
of images, is conspicuous in proportion to the importance of the
subject, as well as to the nature of those sentiments with which it
stands in more immediate connection. It is therefore the business of the
Lyric Poet, who would avoid the censure of competing with inequality,
to consider the colouring of which particular ideas are naturally
susceptible, and to discriminate properly betwixt sentiments, whose
native sublimity requires but little assistance from the pencil of art,
and a train of thought which (that it may correspond to the former)
demands the heightening of poetic painting. The astonishing inequalities
which we meet with, even in the productions of unquestioned Genius, are
originally to be deduced from the carelessness of the Poet who permitted
his imagination to be hurried from one object to another, dwelling with
pleasure upon a favourite idea, and passing slightly over intermediate
steps, that he may catch that beauty which fluctuates on the gaze of
Expectation.

I shall only observe further on this subject, that nothing is more
contrary to the end of Lyric Poetry, than that habit of spinning out a
metaphor which a Po