portion as at present estimated), there was a place even on the
Hellenic Parnassus for gnomic bards, and theirs in the nature of the
case must always be the largest public.

'Music is the perfection of the soul or the idea of poetry,' so you
wrote; 'the vagueness of exaltation aroused by a sweet air (which should
be indefinite and never too strongly suggestive), is precisely what we
should aim at in poetry.' You aimed at that mark, and struck it again
and again, notably in 'Helen, thy beauty is to me,' in 'The Haunted
Palace,' 'The Valley of Unrest,' and 'The City in the Sea.' But by some
Nemesis which might, perhaps, have been foreseen, you are, to the world,
the poet of one poem--'The Raven:' a piece in which the music is highly
artificial, and the 'exaltation' (what there is of it) by no means
particularly 'vague.' So a portion of the public know little of Shelley
but the 'Skylark,' and those two incongruous birds, the lark and the
raven, bear each of them a poet's name _vivu' per ora virum_. Your
theory of poetry, if accepted, would make you (after the author of
'Kubla Khan') the foremost of the poets of the world; at no long
distance would come Mr. William Morris as he was when he wrote 'Golden
Wings,' 'The Blue Closet,' and 'The Sailing of the Sword;' and, close
up, Mr. Lear, the author of 'The Yongi Bongi Bo,' and the lay of the
'Jumblies.'

On the other hand Homer would sink into the limbo to which you consigned
Moliere. If we may judge a theory by its results, when compared with the
deliberate verdict of the world, your aesthetic does not seem to hold
water. The 'Odyssey' is not really inferior to 'Ulalume,' as it ought to
be if your doctrine of poetry were correct, nor 'Le Festin de Pierre to
'Undine.' Yet you deserve the praise of having been constant, in your
poetic practice, to your poetic principles--principles commonly deserted
by poets who, like Wordsworth, have published their aesthetic system.
Your pieces are few; and Dr. Johnson would have called you, like
Fielding, 'a barren rascal.' But how can a writer's verses be numerous
if with him, as with you, 'poetry is not a pursuit but a passion...
which cannot at will be excited with an eye to the paltry compensations
or the more paltry commendations of mankind!' Of you it may be said,
more truly than Shelley said it of himself, that 'to ask you for
anything human, is like asking at a gin-shop for a leg of mutton.'

Humanity must always be, to the majori