poetry has, it appears to me, felt the influence.  To the exclusive attention on the part of his imitators to this, it is in a great degree owing that of the majority of modern poetical works the details alone are valuable, the composition worthless.  In reading them one is perpetually reminded of that terrible sentence on a modern French poet,—­il dit tout ce qu’il veut, mais malheureusement il n’a rien a dire.[14]

Let me give an instance of what I mean.  I will take it from the works of the very chief among those who seem to have been formed in the school of Shakespeare; of one whose exquisite genius and pathetic death render him forever interesting.  I will take the poem of Isabella, or the Pot of Basil, by Keats.  I choose this rather than the Endymion, because the latter work (which a modern critic has classed with the Faery Queen!), although undoubtedly there blows through it the breath of genius, is yet as a whole so utterly incoherent, as not strictly to merit the name of a poem at all.  The poem of Isabella, then, is a perfect treasure-house of graceful and felicitous words and images:  almost in every stanza there occurs one of those vivid and picturesque turns of expression, by which the object is made to flash upon the eye of the mind, and which thrill the reader with a sudden delight.  This one short poem contains, perhaps, a greater number of happy single expressions which one could quote than all the extant tragedies of Sophocles.  But the action, the story?  The action in itself is an excellent one; but so feebly is it conceived by the poet, so loosely constructed, that the effect produced by it, in and for itself, is absolutely null.  Let the reader, after he has finished the poem of Keats, turn to the same story in the Decameron:[15] he will then feel how pregnant and interesting the same action has become in the hands of a great artist, who above all things delineates his object; who subordinates expression to that which it is designed to express.

I have said that the imitators of Shakespeare, fixing their attention on his wonderful gift of expression, have directed their imitation to this, neglecting his other excellences.  These excellences, the fundamental excellences of poetical art, Shakespeare no doubt possessed them—­ possessed many of them in a splendid degree; but it may perhaps be doubted whether even he himself did not sometimes give scope to his faculty of expression to the prejudice of a higher poetical duty.  For we must never forget that Shakespeare is the great poet he is from his skill in discerning and firmly conceiving an excellent action, from his power of intensely feeling a situation, of intimately associating himself with a character; not from his gift of expression, which rather even leads him astray, degenerating sometimes into a fondness for curiosity of expression, into an irritability of fancy, which seems to make it impossible for him to say a thing plainly, even when the press of the