sufficiently at ease to trace them to their
causes, and to estimate the powers which produce them. Our attention is
speedily diverted from the images which call forth our tears to the art
by which those images have been selected and combined. We applaud the
genius of the writer. We applaud our own sagacity and sensibility; and
we are comforted.

Yet, though we think that in the progress of nations towards refinement
the reasoning powers are improved at the expense of the imagination, we
acknowledge that to this rule there are many apparent exceptions. We
are not, however, quite satisfied that they are more than apparent. Men
reasoned better, for example, in the time of Elizabeth than in the time
of Egbert; and they also wrote better poetry. But we must distinguish
between poetry as a mental act, and poetry as a species of composition.
If we take it in the latter sense, its excellence depends not solely on
the vigour of the imagination, but partly also on the instruments which
the imagination employs. Within certain limits, therefore, poetry may be
improving while the poetical faculty is decaying. The vividness of the
picture presented to the reader is not necessarily proportioned to the
vividness of the prototype which exists in the mind of the writer. In
the other arts we see this clearly. Should a man, gifted by nature with
all the genius of Canova, attempt to carve a statue without instruction
as to the management of his chisel, or attention to the anatomy of
the human body, he would produce something compared with which the
Highlander at the door of a snuff shop would deserve admiration. If an
uninitiated Raphael were to attempt a painting, it would be a mere daub;
indeed, the connoisseurs say that the early works of Raphael are little
better. Yet, who can attribute this to want of imagination? Who can
doubt that the youth of that great artist was passed amidst an ideal
world of beautiful and majestic forms? Or, who will attribute the
difference which appears between his first rude essays and his
magnificent Transfiguration to a change in the constitution of his
mind? In poetry, as in painting and sculpture, it is necessary that
the imitator should be well acquainted with that which he undertakes to
imitate, and expert in the mechanical part of his art. Genius will not
furnish him with a vocabulary: it will not teach him what word most
exactly corresponds to his idea, and will most fully convey it to
others: it wil