KNOWN--that is, affections of the heart and imagination
become understood subject-matter to the self-conscious intelligence.
Must feeling perish because intelligence sounds its depths? Quite the
reverse. Greatest minds are those in which, in and out of poetry, the
understanding contemplates the will. Then first the soul has its proper
strength. Disorderly passions are then tamed, and become the massy
pillars of high-built virtue. Criticism? It is a shape of
self-intuition. Confession and penitence, in the church, are a moral and
a religious criticism. The imagination is less august and solemn, but of
the same character. The first age of the world lived by divine
instincts; the later must by reason. How, then, shall we possess the
poetry of our being, unless we guard and arm it? If it be a benign,
holy, potent faculty, nevertheless it cannot, the most delicate of all
our faculties, sustain itself in the strife of opinions raging and
thundering around. Then, if it should rightly hold dominion over us, let
legislative opinion acknowledge, establish, and fortify that impaled
territory. The temper of the times is in sundry respects favourable,
notwithstanding its too frequent possession by an incensed political
spirit. Has there not been for half a century a spontaneous, an ardent,
a loving return in literature, of our own and all countries, to the old
and great in the productions of the human mind--to nature, with all her
fountains? Does not the spirit of man, in the great civilized nations at
this day, travail with desire of knowing itself, its laws, its
conditions, its means, its powers, its hopes? It studies with irregular,
often blind and perverted, efforts; but still it studies--itself. And is
not criticism, when it speaks, much bolder, more glowing and generous,
ampler-spirited, more inspiring, and withal more enquiring and
philosophical? During the whole period we speak of, poetry and
criticism--in nature near akin--with occasional complaints and quarrels,
have flourished amicably together, side by side. Both have been strong,
healthy, and good. Prigs of both kinds--the pert and the pompous--will
keep prating about the shallowness and superficiality of periodical
criticism--deep enough to drown the whole tribe in its very fords. They
call for systems. Why will they not be contented with the system of the
universe?--of which they know not that periodical criticism is a
conspicuous part. Every other year the nations wit