ing to the faculty or source from which the pleasure given by any poem or passage was derived, I estimated the merit of such poem or passage. As the result of all my reading and meditation, I abstracted two critical aphorisms, deeming them to comprise the conditions and criteria of poetic 5 style; first, that not the poem which we have read, but that to which we return, with the greatest pleasure, possesses the genuine power and claims the name of essential poetry. Second, that whatever lines can be translated into other words of the same language, without diminution of their 10 significance, either in sense or association, or in any worthy feeling, are so far vicious in their diction.1 Be it, however, observed, that I excluded from the list of worthy feelings the pleasure derived from mere novelty in the reader, and the desire of exciting wonderment at his powers in the 15 author. Oftentimes since then, in perusing French tragedies, I have fancied two marks of admiration at the end of each line, as hieroglyphics of the author's own admiration at his own cleverness. Our genuine admiration of a great poet is a continuous undercurrent of feeling; it is every- 20 where present, but seldom anywhere as a separate excitement. I was wont boldly to affirm that it would be scarcely more difficult to push a stone out from the pyramids with the bare hand, than to alter a word, or the position of a word, in Milton or Shakespeare (in their most important 25 works at least) without making the author say something else, or something worse, than he does say. One great distinction I appeared to myself to see plainly, between even the characteristic faults of our elder poets and the false beauties of the moderns. In the former, from Donne to 30 Cowley, we find the most fantastic out-of-the-way thoughts,

but in the most pure and genuine mother English; in the latter, the most obvious thoughts, in language the most fantastic and arbitrary. Our faulty elder poets sacrificed the passion, and passionate flow of poetry, to the subtleties of 5 intellect and to the starts of wit; the moderns to the glare and glitter of a perpetual yet broken and heterogeneous imagery, or rather to an amphibious something, made up, half of image and half of abstract meaning.1 The one sacrificed the heart to the head, the other both heart and head 10 to point and drapery.

The reader must make himself acquainted with the general style of composition that was at that time deemed poetry, in order to understand and account for the effect produced on me by the Sonnets, the Monody at Matlock, 15 and the Hope, of Mr. Bowles; for it is peculiar to original genius to become less and less striking, in proportion to its success in improving the taste and judgment of its contemporaries. The poems of West, indeed, had the merit of chaste and manly diction, but they were cold, and, if I may 20 so express it, only dead-coloured; while in the best of Warton's there is a stiffness, which too often gives them the appearance of imitations from the Greek. Whatever relation, therefore, of cause or impulse Percy's collection of Ballads may bear to the most popular poems of the present 25 day, yet in the more sustained and elevated style of the then living poets Bowles and Cowper 2 were, to the best of my knowledge, the first who combined natural thoughts with natural diction; the first who reconciled the heart with the head.3

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It is true, as I have before mentioned, that from diffidence in my own powers, I for a short time adopted a laborious

and florid diction, which I myself deemed, if not absolutely vicious, yet of very inferior worth. Gradually, however, my practice conformed to my better judgment, and the compositions of my twenty-fourth and twenty-fifth years (for example, the shorter blank verse poems, the lines which 5 are now adopted in the introductory part of the Vision in the present collection in Mr. Southey's Joan of Arc, 2nd book, 1st edition, and the Tragedy of Remorse) are not more below my present ideal in respect of the general tissue of the style than those of the latest date. Their faults 10 were at least a remnant of the former leaven, and among the many who have done me the honour of putting my poems in the same class with those of my betters, the one or two who have pretended to bring examples of affected simplicity from my volume, have been able to adduce but 15 one instance, and that out of a copy of verses half ludicrous, half splenetic, which I intended, and had myself characterized, as sermoni propriora.

Every reform, however necessary, will by weak minds be carried to an excess, that itself will need reforming. The 20 reader will excuse me for noticing that I myself was the first to expose risu honesto the three sins of poetry, one or the other of which is the most likely to beset a young writer. So long ago as the publication of the second number of the Monthly Magazine, under the name of Nehemiah Higgin- 25 bottom I contributed three sonnets, the first of which had for its object to excite a good-natured laugh at the spirit of doleful egotism, and at the recurrence of favourite phrases, with the double defect of being at once trite and licentious. The second on low, creeping language and thoughts, under 30 the pretence of simplicity. And the third, the phrases of

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which were borrowed entirely from my own poems, on the indiscriminate use of elaborate and swelling language and imagery. The reader will find them in the notes,1 and will I trust regard them as reprinted for biographical pur5 poses, and not for their poetic merits. So general at that time, and so decided was the opinion concerning the characteristic vices of my style, that a celebrated physician (now, alas! no more), speaking of me in other respects with his usual kindness to a gentleman who was about to To meet me at a dinner party, could not, however, resist giving him a hint not to mention the "House that Jack built” in my presence, for "that I was as sore as a boil about that sonnet," he not knowing that I was myself the author of it.

CHAPTER II.

The author's obligations to critics, and the probable occasion

Principles

of modern criticism - Mr. Southey's works and character.

To anonymous critics in reviews, magazines, and newsjournals of various name and rank, and to satirists with or without a name, in verse or prose, or in verse-text aided by prose-comment, I do seriously believe and profess, that I owe full two-thirds of whatever reputation and publicity 5 I happen to possess.1 For when the name of an individual has occurred so frequently, in so many works, for so great a length of time, the readers of these works (which with a shelf or two of Beauties, Elegant Extracts, and Anas, form nine-tenths of the reading of the reading public') cannot but 10 be familiar with the name, without distinctly remembering whether it was introduced for eulogy or for censure. And this becomes the more likely, if (as I believe) the habit of perusing periodical works may be properly added to Averroes's catalogue of Anti-mnemonics, or weakeners of the 15 memory. But where this has not been the case, yet the reader will be apt to suspect that there must be something more than usually strong and extensive in a reputation, that could either require or stand so merciless and long-continued a cannonading. Without any feeling of anger there- 20 fore (for which, indeed, on my own account, I have no pretext) I may yet be allowed to express some degree of sur

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