At school I had the advantage of a very sensible though severe master.  I learned from him that poetry, even that of the loftiest odes, had a logic of its own as severe as that of science, and more difficult, because more subtle.  In the truly great poets, he would say, there is a reason assignable, not only for every word, but for the position of every word.  In our English compositions he showed no mercy to phrase, metaphor, or image, where the same sense might have been conveyed with equal force and dignity in plainer words.  In fancy, I can almost hear him now exclaiming:  “Harp?  Lyre?  Pen and ink, boy, you mean!” Nay, certain introductions, similes, and examples were placed by name on a list of interdiction.

I had just entered my seventeenth year when the sonnets of Mr. Bowles were made known to me, and the genial influence of his poetry, so tender, yet so manly, so natural and real, yet so dignified and harmonious, recalled me from a premature bewilderment in metaphysics and theology.  Well were it for me, perhaps, if I had never relapsed into the same mental disease.

The poetry of Pope and his followers, a school of French poetry invigorated by English understanding, which had predominated from the last century, consisted of prose thoughts translated into poetic language.  I was led to the conjecture that this style had been kept up by, if it did not wholly arise from, the custom of writing Latin verses.  I began to defend the use of natural language, such as “I will remember thee,” instead of “Thy image on her wing, Before my fancy’s eye shall memory bring;” and adduced, as examples of simplicity, the diction of Greek poets, and of our elder English poets, from Chaucer to Milton.  I arrived at two critical aphorisms, as the criteria of poetic style:  first, that not the poem which we have read with the greatest pleasure but that to which we return with the greatest pleasure possesses the genuine power; and, second, that whatever lines can be translated into other words of the same language, without diminution of their significance, are so far vicious in their diction.

One great distinction between even the characteristic faults of our elder poets and the false beauties of the moderns is this.  In the former, from Donne to Cowley, we find the most fantastic out-of-the-way thoughts, but 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 intellect and to the starts of wit; the moderns to the glare and glitter of a perpetual yet broken and heterogeneous imagery.  The one sacrificed the heart to the head, the other both heart and head to drapery.

II.—­In Praise of Southey

Reflect on the variety and extent of his acquirements!  He stands second to no man, either as a historian or as a bibliographer; and when I regard him as a popular essayist I look in vain for any writer who has conveyed so much information, from so many and such recondite sources, with as many just and original reflections, in a style so lively yet so uniformly classical and perspicuous; no one, in short, who has combined so much wisdom with so much wit; so much truth and knowledge with so much life and fancy.