bring your ship off the stocks?” for no reason that I know, except that ships are built to be launched.  The water, &c. undoubtedly HEIGHTENS the poetical associations, but it does not make them; and the ship amply repays the obligation:  they aid each other; the water is more poetical with the ship—­the ship less so without the water.  But even a ship laid up in dock, is a grand and a poetical sight.  Even an old boat, keel upwards, wrecked upon the barren sand, is a “poetical” object, (and Wordsworth, who made a poem about a washing tub and a blind boy, may tell you so as well as I,) whilst a long extent of sand and unbroken water, without the boat, would be as like dull prose as any pamphlet lately published.

What makes the poetry in the image of the “marble waste of Tadmor,” or Grainger’s “Ode to Solitude,” so much admired by Johnson?  Is it the “marble” or the “waste,” the artificial or the natural object?  The “waste” is like all other wastes; but the “marble” of Palmyra makes the poetry of the passage as of the place.

The beautiful but barren Hymettus, the whole coast of Attica, her hills and mountains, Pentelicus, Anchesmus, Philopappus, &c. &c. are in themselves poetical, and would be so if the name of Athens, of Athenians, and her very ruins, were swept from the earth.  But am I to be told that the “nature” of Attica would be more poetical without the “art” of the Acropolis? of the Temple of Theseus? and of the still all Greek and glorious monuments of her exquisitely artificial genius?  Ask the traveller what strikes him as most poetical, the Parthenon, or the rock on which it stands?  The COLUMNS of Cape Colonna, or the Cape itself?  The rocks at the foot of it, or the recollection that Falconer’s ship was bulged upon them?  There are a thousand rocks and capes far more picturesque than those of the Acropolis and Cape Sunium in themselves; what are they to a thousand scenes in the wilder parts of Greece, of Asia Minor, Switzerland, or even of Cintra in Portugal, or to many scenes of Italy, and the Sierras of Spain?  But it is the “art,” the columns, the temples, the wrecked vessel, which give them their antique and their modern poetry, and not the spots themselves.  Without them, the spots of earth would be unnoticed and unknown; buried, like Babylon and Nineveh, in indistinct confusion, without poetry, as without existence; but to whatever spot of earth these ruins were transported, if they were capable of transportation, like the obelisk, and the sphinx, and the Memnon’s head, there they would still exist in the perfection of their beauty, and in the pride of their poetry.  I opposed, and will ever oppose, the robbery of ruins from Athens, to instruct the English in sculpture; but why did I do so?  The ruins are as poetical in Piccadilly as they were in the Parthenon; but the Parthenon and its rock are less so without them.  Such is the poetry of art.