The answer to all this is ready nowadays.  We are told that Pope could easily be great in what he attempted, because he never attempted any but small matters; easily self-restraining, because his paces were naturally so slow; above all, easily clear, because he is always shallow; easily full of faith in what he did believe, because he believed so very little.  On the two former counts we may have something to say hereafter.  On the two latter, we will say at once, that if it be argued, as it often is, that the reason of our modern poetical obscurity and vagueness lies in the greater depth of the questions which are now agitating thoughtful minds, we do utterly deny it.  Human nature, human temptations, human problems, are radically the same in every age, by whatsoever outward difference of words they may seem distinguished.  Where is deeper philosophic thought, true or false, expressed in verse, than in Dante, or in Spenser’s two cantos of “Mutabilities”?  Yet if they are difficult to understand, their darkness is that of the deep blue sea.  Vague they never are, obscure they never are, because they see clearly what they want to say, and how to say it.  There is always a sound and coherent meaning in them, to be found if it be searched for.

The real cause of this modern vagueness is rather to be found in shallow and unsound culture, and in that inability, or carelessness about seeing any object clearly, which besets our poets just now; as the cause of antique clearness lies in the nobler and healthier manhood, in the severer and more methodic habits of thought, the sounder philosophic and critical training, which enabled Spenser and Milton to draw up a state paper, or to discourse deep metaphysics, with the same manful possession of their subject which gives grace and completeness to the “Penseroso” or the “Epithalamion.”  And if our poets have their doubts, they should remember, that those to whom doubt and inquiry are real and stern, are not inclined to sing about them till they can sing poems of triumph over them.  There has no temptation taken our modern poets save that which is common to man—­ the temptation of wishing to make the laws of the universe and of art fit them, as they do not feel inclined to make themselves fit the laws, or care to find them out.

What!  Do you wish, asks some one, a little contemptuously, to measure the great growing nineteenth century by the thumb-rule of Alexander Pope?  No.  But to measure the men who write in the nineteenth century by a man who wrote in the eighteenth; to compare their advantages with his, their circumstances with his:  and then, if possible, to make them ashamed of their unmanliness.  Have you young poets of this day, your struggles, your chagrins?  Do you think the hump-backed dwarf, every moment conscious at once of his deformity and his genius—­conscious, probably, of far worse physical shame than any deformity can bring, “sewed up in buckram every morning,