considerable in
our language from the Elizabethan age to the present time.
Chaucer is anterior; and on other grounds, too, he cannot
well be brought into the comparison. But taking the roll of
our chief poetical names, besides Shakespeare and Milton,
from the age of Elizabeth downwards, and going through
it,--Spenser, Dryden, Pope, Gray, Goldsmith, Cowper, Burns,
Coleridge, Scott, Campbell, Moore, Byron, Shelley, Keats (I
mention those only who are dead),--I think it certain that
Wordsworth's name deserves to stand, and will finally stand,
above them all. Several of the poets named have gifts and
excellencies which Wordsworth has not. But taking the
performance of each as a whole, I say that Wordsworth seems
to me to have left a body of poetical work superior in
power, in interest, in the qualities which give enduring
freshness, to that which any one of the others has left."
("Essay on Wordsworth," by Matthew Arnold.)

"Perhaps no person can be a poet, or can even enjoy poetry,
without a certain unsoundness of mind, if anything which
gives so much pleasure ought to be called unsoundness. By
poetry we mean not all writing in verse, nor even all good
writing in verse. Our definition excludes many metrical
compositions which, on other grounds, deserve the highest
praise. By poetry, we mean the art of employing words in
such a manner as to produce an illusion on the imagination,
the art of doing by means of words what the painter does by
means of colors. Thus the greatest of the poets has
described it, in lines universally admired for the vigor and
felicity of their diction, and still more valuable on
account of the just notion which they convey of the art in
which he excelled:--

'As imagination bodies forth
The forms of things unknown, the poet's pen
Turns them to shapes, and gives to airy nothing
A local habitation and a name.'

These are the fruits of the 'fine frenzy' which he ascribes
to the poet,--a fine frenzy, doubtless, but still a frenzy.
Truth, indeed, is essential to poetry, but it is the truth
of madness. The reasonings are just, but the premises are
false. After the first suppositions have been made,
everything ought to be consistent; but those first
suppositions require