other company. She will nurse it,
dress it, and talk to it all day. No grown-up man takes half so much
delight in one of the incomparable babies of Chantrey. In the same
manner, savages are more affected by the rude compositions of their
bards than nations more advanced in civilisation by the greatest
master-pieces of poetry.

In process of time, the instruments by which the imagination works are
brought to perfection. Men have not more imagination than their rude
ancestors. We strongly suspect that they have much less. But they
produce better works of imagination. Thus, up to a certain period, the
diminution of the poetical powers is far more than compensated by the
improvement of all the appliances and means of which those powers
stand in need. Then comes the short period of splendid and consummate
excellence. And then, from causes against which it is vain to struggle,
poetry begins to decline. The progress of language, which was at first
favourable, becomes fatal to it, and, instead of compensating for the
decay of the imagination, accelerates that decay, and renders it more
obvious. When the adventurer in the Arabian tale anointed one of his
eyes with the contents of the magical box, all the riches of the earth,
however widely dispersed, however sacredly concealed, became visible to
him. But, when he tried the experiment on both eyes, he was struck
with blindness. What the enchanted elixir was to the sight of the body,
language is to the sight of the imagination. At first it calls up
a world of glorious allusions; but, when it becomes too copious, it
altogether destroys the visual power.

As the development of the mind proceeds, symbols, instead of being
employed to convey images, are substituted for them. Civilised men think
as they trade, not in kind, but by means of a circulating medium. In
these circumstances, the sciences improve rapidly, and criticism among
the rest; but poetry, in the highest sense of the word, disappears. Then
comes the dotage of the fine arts, a second childhood, as feeble as the
former, and far more hopeless. This is the age of critical poetry, of
poetry by courtesy, of poetry to which the memory, the judgment, and the
wit contribute far more than the imagination. We readily allow that many
works of this description are excellent: we will not contend with those
who think them more valuable than the great poems of an earlier period.
We only maintain that they belong to a different species