FROM THE AUTHOR'S

PREFACE TO THE EDITION OF 1832

I INTENDED to write a very short preface to the volume here submitted to the public indulgence; but finding the small number of pages to which it amounted, compared with the price put upon it in the advertisement, I wished to do what I could towards bringing it to a becoming size. To add verses which I had rejected, would have been an injustice both to the readers and myself. It was suggested to me that a 'good gossiping preface' would not be ill received; and I therefore write one in the true spirit of that word, leaving it to their good nature to interpret it accordingly. I am so aware that the world is rich in books of all sorts, and that its attention, beyond the moment, is not to be looked for by voluminous writers, except those of the first order, that I have done my best to render my verses as little unworthy of re-perusal, as correction and omission could make them. I have availed myself of the criticism both of friends and enemies; and have been so willing to construe in my disfavour any doubts which arose in my own mind, that the volume does not contain above a third of the verses I have written. I took for granted, that an author's self-love is pretty sure not to be too hard upon him, and adopted the principle of making the doubt itself a sentence of condemnation. Upon this I have acted in every instance, with the exception of the Fragments upon the Nymphs, the Sonnet on the Nile, and the passages out of the Bacchus in Tuscany. The fragments, and the sonnet, a partial friend induced me not to discard: otherwise, with a doubt perhaps in favour of the second and eighth lines of the sonnet, I felt that they did not possess enough of the subtler and remoter spirit of poetry, demanded by the titles. Of the Bacchus I retained a few specimens, partly for the sake of old associations, and of the tune echoed into it from the Italian ; but chiefly in consequence of discovering that it had found favour in unexpected quarters.

If it be asked, why I have not been as scrupulous with the whole volume, or whether I look upon the rest of it as being free from objection, I answer, that I only believe it to be as good as it was in the writer's power to make it. What that power may be, if any, is another matter. At all events, I cannot accuse myself of taking no pains to satisfy my own judgment, or to bespeak the reader's good wishes. I have not shovelled my verses out by cart-loads, leaving the public, much less another generation, to save me the trouble of selection! I do not believe that other generations will take the trouble to rake for jewels in much nobler dust than mine. Posterity is too rich and idle. The only hope I can have of coming into any one's hands, and exciting his attention

beyond the moment, is by putting my workmanship, such as it is, into its best and compactest state.

The truth is, I have such a reverence for poetry, pre-eminently so called (by which I mean that which posterity and the greatest poets agree to call such), that I should not dare to apply the term to anything written by me in verse, were I not fortunate enough to be of opinion, that poetry, like the trees and flowers, is not of one class only; but that if the plant comes out of Nature's hands, and not the gauze-maker's, it is still a plant, and has ground for it. All houses are not palaces, nor every shrine a cathedral. In domo patris mei (not to speak it profanely) mansiones multæ sunt.

Poetry, in its highest sense, belongs exclusively to such men as Shakspeare, Spenser, and others, who possessed the deepest insight into the spirit and sympathies of all things; but poetry, in the most comprehensive application of the term, I take to be the flower of any kind of experience, rooted in truth, and issuing forth into beauty. All that the critic has a right to demand of it, according to its degree, is, that it should spring out of a real impulse, be consistent in its parts, and shaped into some characteristic harmony of verse. Without these requisites (apart from fleeting and artificial causes), the world will scarcely look at any poetical production a second time; whereas, if it possess them, the humblest poetry stands a chance of surviving not only whatever is falsely so called, but much that contains, here and there, more poetical passages than itself; passages that are the fits and starts of a fancy without judgment -the incoherences of a nature, poetical only by convulsion, but prosaic in its ordinary strength.

Thus, in their several kinds, we have the poetry of thought and passion in Shakspeare and Chaucer; of poetical abstraction and enjoyment in Spenser; of scholarship and a rapt ambition in Milton; of courtliness in Waller (who writes like an inspired gentleman-usher); of gallantry in Suckling; of wit and satire in Pope; of heartiness in Burns; of the 'fat of the land' in Thomson; of a certain sequestered gentleness in Shenstone; and the poetry of prose itself in Dryden: not that he was a prosaic writer, but that what other people thought in prose, he could think in verse; and so made absolute poems of pamphlets and partyreasoning.

The first quality of a poet is imagination, or that faculty by which the subtlest idea is given us of the nature or condition of any one thing, by illustration from another, or by the inclusion of remote affinities: as when Shakspeare speaks of moonlight sleeping on a bank; or of nice customs curtseying to great kings (though the reader may, if he pleases, put this under the head of wit, or imagination in miniature); or where Milton speaks of towers bosom'd in trees, or of motes that people the sunbeams; or compares Satan on the wing at a distance, to a fleet of ships hanging in the clouds; or where Mr. Shelley (for I avoid quoting from living writers, lest it should be thought invidious towards such as are not quoted) puts that stately, superior, and comprehensive image, into the mouth of a speaker who is at once firm of soul, and yet anticipates a dreadful necessity

'I see, as from a tower, the end of all:'

or lastly, where Mr. Keats tells us of the realmless eyes of old Saturn (as he sits musing after his dethronement); or of the two brothers and their murdered man, riding from Florence; that is to say, the man whom they were about to murder; or where, by one exquisite touch, he describes an important and affecting office of the god Mercury, and the effects of it upon the spectators in the lower world-calling him the star of Lethe' by which we see that he was the only bright object which visited that dreary region. We behold him rising on its borders.

In proportion to the imagination, is the abstract poetical faculty: in proportion to extent of sympathy (for passion, which is everywhere in poetry, may be comparatively narrow and self-revolving), is the power of universality: in proportion to energy of temperament and variety of experience, is the power of embodying the conceptions in a greater or less amount of consistent and stirring action, whether narrative or dramatic. The greatest poets have the greatest amount of all these qualities conjoined: the next greatest are those who unite the first two: the next, those whose imagination is exquisite as far as it goes, but is confined to certain spheres of contemplation: then come the poets, who have less imagination, but more action-who are imaginative, as it were, in the mass, and with a certain vague enjoyment allied to the feelings of youth: then the purely artificial poets, or such as poetize in art rather than nature, or upon conventional beauty and propriety, as distinguished from beauty universal: and then follow the minor wits, the song-writers, burlesquers, &c. In every instance, the indispensable requisites are truth of feeling, freedom from superfluity (that is, absence of forced or unfitting thoughts), and beauty of result; and in proportion as these requisites are comprehensive, profound, and active, the poet is great. But it is always to be borne in mind, that the writers in any of these classes, who take lasting hold of the world's attention, are justly accounted superior to such as afford less evidences of power in a higher class. The pretension is nothing; the performance every thing. A good apple is better than an insipid peach. A song of Burns is (literally) worth half the poets in the collections.

Suckling's Ballad on a Wedding is a small and unambitious, yet unmisgiving and happy production, of no rank whatsoever considered with reference to the height of poetry; but so excellent of its kind for consistency, freshness, and relish, that it has survived hundreds of epithalamiums, and epics too; and will last as long as beauty has a lip, or gallantry frankness.

Shenstone's 'School-mistress is a poem of a very humble description in subject, style, and everything, except its humane and thoughtful sweetness: yet being founded in truth, and consistent, and desiring nothing but truth and consistency, it has survived in like manner. Compared with greater productions, it resembles the herbs which the author speaks of in its cottage-garden; but balm and mint have their flourishing, as well as the aloe; and like them, and its old heroine, it has secured its 'grey renown,' clean as her mob-cap, and laid up in lavender. Crashaw is a poet now scarcely known except to book-worms. Pope said of him, that his writing was a mixture of tender gentle thoughts and suitable expressions, of forced and inextricable conceits, and of needless fillers-up

to the rest.' Crashaw had a morbid enthusiasm, which sometimes helped him to an apprehensiveness and depth of expression, perhaps beyond the voluntary power of his great critic; yet Pope, by writing nothing out of what the painters call 'keeping', or unworthy of himself, is justly reckoned worth a hundred Crashaws. Random thoughts and fillings-up are a poet's felo de se.

Far am I, in making these remarks, from pretending to claim any part or parcel in the fellowship of names consecrated by time. I can truly say, that, except when I look upon some others that get into the collections, consecrated by no hands but the book-jobbers, I do not know (after I have written them) whether my verses deserve to live a dozen days longer. The confession may be thought strong or weak, as it happens; but such is the fact. I have witnessed so much self-delusion in my time, and partaken of so much, and the older I grow, my veneration so increases for poetry not to be questioned, that all I can be sure of, is my admiration of genius in others. I cannot say how far I overvalue it, or even undervalue it, in myself. I am in the condition of a lover who is sure that he loves, and is therefore happy in the presence of the beloved object; but is uncertain how far he is worthy to be beloved. Perhaps the symptom is a bad one, and only better than that of a confident ignorance. Perhaps the many struggles of my life; the strange conflicting thoughts upon a thousand matters, into which I have been forced; the necessity of cultivating some modesty of self-knowledge, as a set-off to peremptoriness of public action; and the unceasing alternation of a melancholy and a cheerfulness, equally native to my blood-and the latter of which I have suffered to go its lengths, both as an innocent propensity and a means of resistance-have combined in me to baffle conclusion, and filled me full of these perhapses, which I have observed growing upon my writings for many years past. Perhaps the question is not worth a word I have said of it, except upon that principle of 'gossiping' with which my preface sets out, and which I hope will procure me the reader's pardon for starting it. All that I was going to say was, that if I cannot do in poetry what ought to be done, I know what ought not; and that if there is no truth in my verses, I look for no indulgence.

As I do write poetry however, such as it is, I must have my side of confidence as well as of misgiving; and when I am in the humour for thinking that I have done something that may dare hope to be called by the name, I fancy I know where my station is. I please myself with thinking, that had the circumstances of my life permitted it, I might have done something a little worthier of acceptance, in the way of a mixed kind of narrative poetry, part lively and part serious, somewhere between the longer poems of the Italians, and the Fabliaux of the old French. My propensity would have been (and, oh! had my duties permitted, how willingly would I have passed my life in it! how willingly now pass it!) to write eternal new stories' in verse, of no great length, but just sufficient to vent the pleasure with which I am stung on meeting with some touching adventure, and which haunts me till I can speak of it somehow. I would have dared to pretend to be a servant in the train of Ariosto, nay, of Chaucer,

'-and far off his skirts adore.'

I sometimes look at the trusting animal spirits in which the following poems were written (for my doubts come after I have done writing, and not while I am about it), and wonder whether or not they are of a right sort. I know not. I cannot tell whether what pleased me at the moment, was mere pleasure taken in the subject, or whether it involved the power of communicating it to the reader. All I can be sure of is, that I was in earnest; that the feelings, whatever they were, which I pretended to have, I had. It was the mistake of the criticism of a northern climate, to think that the occasional quaintnesses and neologisms, which formerly disfigured the Story of Rimini, arose out of affectation. They were the sheer license of animal spirits. While I was writing them, I never imagined that they were not proper to be indulged in. I have tropical blood in my veins, inherited through many generations, and was too full of impulse and sincerity to pretend to anything I did not feel. Probably the criticisms were not altogether a matter of climate; for I was a writer of politics as well as verses, and the former (two years ago !) were as illegal as the sallies of phraseology. Be this as it may, I have here shown, that I have at any rate not enough of the vanity of affectation to hinder me from availing myself of experience, and ridding my volume both of superfluities of a larger sort, and of those petty anomalies of words and phrases which I never thought worth defending. I believe there are but two words remaining in the Story of Rimini, to which any body would think it worth while to object; and one of these (the word swirl in page 1) 1 I had marked to be taken out, but found it restored by a friend who saw the passage as it was going through the press (no stickler for neologisms), and who put a wondering 'quære' why it should be omitted. I used it to express the entrance of a sailing boat into harbour, when it turns the corner of it, and comes round with a sweeping motion. 'Sweep' would have described the motion but not the figure. 'Wheel' appeared to me too mechanical, and to make the circle too complete. I could find, therefore, no other word for the mixed idea which I wished to convey; and as swirl is in the dictionaries, I had no hesitation in submitting to the query, and letting it remain. The other word is 'cored,' at page 152, meaning something that has taken root in the heart of our consciousness. I give it up to the critic, if he dislikes it, having accidentally let the proof-sheet, which contained it, go to press beyond power of recal. I care no more for it, than if it had been the oldest and least venerable of commonplaces. I should beg the reader's pardon for detaining him so long with these trifles, did not my value for his good opinion in higher matters, make me wish not to be thought contemptuous of it in the smallest.

My verses having thus been corrected, as far as I saw occasion, and evidence enough (I hope) having been given to show that I have no overweening value for what I have written, merely because I have written it, I should prove indeed that I had no reason to doubt the measure of my pretensions, if I gave up the right of keeping my own opinion, upon points on which I did not feel it shaken. I have therefore retained in my versification, not only the triplets and alexandrines which some have objected to, because they have been rarely used in heroic poetry since

1 [Canto I, line 24.]

[Canto III, line 84.]