“She dwelt among the untrodden ways,
  Beside the springs of Dove,
  A maid whom there were none to praise,
  And very few to love.”

The first line, romantically treated, would include description, soliloquy, and narrative, to show that in solitude the maiden had habits, duties, something to think about and be interested in.  The accidental approach of some cosmopolitan visitor would give occasion to illustrate dramatically the contrast between life in retirement and in society.  Some novelists also would inflict, either by direct lecture or by conversation of the actors, very admirable reflections on the comparative advantages of the two conditions.  The second line would perhaps suggest only geographical lore and descriptions of scenery, though historical episodes might be added.  The third line would involve a minute description of dress, complexion, stature, and wild gracefulness.  In a psychological investigation it would come out what strange and simple notions she entertained of the great world, and what charming qualities of unsophisticated character belonged to her as she merrily or pensively went through her accustomed tasks.  The fourth line, in which love is the text, would swell into mammoth proportions.  New characters would be especially necessary in this culminating part of the story; and though they should be “very few,” they would long occupy the novelist with their diverse excellencies or villanies, their rivalries and strategies.  It is probable that the complete development of the stanza a la romance would give a circumstantial history of the maiden from her birth, with glimpses more or less clear of all the remarkable people who dwelt near or occasionally visited the springs of Dove.  Thus the same conception would become a stanza or a volume, according as its treatment were lyrical or romantic.

It need hardly be shown that the novel is not a drama, not a history, nor fable, nor any sort of philosophical treatise.  It may have sentences, paragraphs, or perhaps chapters, in every style and of the highest excellence, as a shapeless architectural pile may rejoice in some exquisite features or ornaments; but combined passages, though they were the collected charms of literature, do not make a work of art.  The styles are mixed,—­a certain sign, according to Lessing, of corruption of taste.  Novels present the anomaly of being fiction, but not poetry,—­of being fruits of imagination, but of imagination improvising its creations from local and temporal things, instead of speaking from a sublime stand-point and linking series of facts with processions of ideas.  Sources of history, guides of philosophical retrospection, they may come some time to be; yet one cannot check a feeling of pity for the future historian who, in searching the “Pickwick Papers” for antiquities, finds himself bothered and confused by all the undisciplined witches of Mr. Dickens’s imagination.