f Avon, whence thy rosy fingers cull
Fresh flowers and dews to sprinkle on the turf
Where Shakspere lies."

But Akenside is too abstract. In place of images, he presents the reader
with dissertations. A poem which takes imagination as its subject rather
than its method will inevitably remain, not poetry but a lecture on
poetry--a theory of beauty, not an example of it. Akenside might have
chosen for his motto Milton's lines:

"How charming is divine philosophy!
Not harsh and crabbed, as dull fools suppose,
But musical as is Apollo's lute."

Yet he might have remembered, too, what Milton said about the duty of
poetry to be simple, sensuous, and passionate. Akenside's is nothing of
these; it is, on the contrary obscure, metaphysical, and, as a
consequence, frigid. Following Addison, he names greatness and novelty,
_i.e._, the sublime and the wonderful, as, equally with beauty, the chief
sources of imaginative pleasure, and the whole poem is a plea for what we
are now accustomed to call the ideal. In the first book there is a
passage which is fine in spirit and--though in a less degree--in
expression:

"Who that from Alpine heights his laboring eye
Shoots round the wide horizon, to survey
Nilus or Ganges rolling his bright wave
Through mountains, plains, through empires black with shade.
And continents of sand, will turn his gaze
To mark the windings of a scanty rill
That murmurs at his feet? The high-born soul
Disdains to rest her heaven-aspiring wing
Beneath its native quarry. Tired of earth
And this diurnal scene, she springs aloft
Through fields of air; pursues the flying storm;
Rides on the vollied lightning through the heavens;
Or, yoked with whirlwinds and the northern blast,
Sweeps the long trace of day."

The hint for this passage was furnished by a paragraph in Addison's
second paper (_Spectator_, 412) and the emotion is the same to which
Goethe gives utterance in the well-known lines of "Faust";

"Doch jedem ist es eingeboren
Dass sein Gefuehl hinauf und vorwaerts dringt," etc.

But how greatly superior in sharpness of detail, richness of invention,
energy of movement is the German to the English poet!

Akenside ranks among the earlier Spenserians by virtue of his "Virtuoso"
(1737) and of several odes composed in a ten-lined variation on Spenser's
stanza. A collection of his "Odes" appeared in 1745--the