the dullest, but it is brief: endure it, and pray you
consider the deadliness of the topic, and the barbarous cruelty
wherewith courtesy has clipped the wings of my poor spite. Let us turn
to other title-pages; assuring all the world that no specific mountebank
has been here intended, and that nothing more is meant than a nerveless
blow against legal cant, quainter than Quarles's, and against that
well-known species of Equity, which must have been so titled from like
antiquated reasons with those that induced Numa and his company to call
a dark grove, lucus.

* * * * *

How many foes, in this utilitarian era, has that very unwarrantable
vice, called Poetry! All who despise love and love-making, all who
prefer billiards to meditation, all who value hard cash above mental
riches, feel privileged to hate it; while really, typographers, the
illegible diamond print in which you generally set it up, whether in
book, or newspaper, or handbill, or magazine, induces many an
indifferent peruser to skip the poem for the sake of his eye-sight. I
presume that the monosyllable, rhyme, comprehends pretty nearly all that
the world at large intends by poetry; and, in the same manner as certain
critics have sneered at Livy--no, it was Tacitus--for commencing his
work with a bad hexameter, so many a reader will now-a-days condemn a
whole book, because it is somewhere found guilty of harbouring a
distich. But poetry, friend World, means far other than rhyme; its
etymology would yield "creation," or "fabrication," of sense as well as
sound, and of melody for the eye as well as melody for the ear. So did
[_epoiese_] Milton; and so did not---- Well, I myself, if you will. Yet,
in fact, there are fifty other kinds of poetries, beside the poetry of
words: as the poetry of life--affection, honour, and hope, and
generosity; the poetry of beauty--never mind what features decorate the
Dulcinea, for this species of poetry is felt and seen almost only in
first love; the poetry of motion, as first-rates majestically sailing,
furiously scudding waves, bending corn-fields, and, briefly, all things
moveable but railway-trains; the poetry of rest, as pyramids, a tropical
calm, an arctic winter, and generally all things quiescent but a
slumbering alderman; the poetry of music, heard oftener in a country
milkmaid's evening song, than in many a concert-room; the poetry of
elegance, more natural to weeping willows, unbroken col