too early, but admitted that now and then it rose “even to the best, particularly in description.”  Akenside was harsh, formal, and dogmatic, as a man.  Smollett caricatured him in “Peregrine Pickle.”  Johnson hated his Whig principles and represents him, when settled at Northampton, as “having deafened the place with clamors for liberty."[47] He furthermore disliked the class of poetry to which Akenside’s work belonged, and he told Boswell that he couldn’t read it.  Still he speaks of him with a certain cautious respect, which seems rather a concession to contemporary opinion than an appreciation of the critic’s own.  He even acknowledges that Akenside has “few artifices of disgust than most of his brethren of the blank song.”  Lowell says that the very title of Akenside’s poem pointed “away from the level highway of commonplace to mountain paths and less dogmatic prospects.  The poem was stiff and unwilling, but in its loins lay the seed of nobler births.  Without it, the ‘Lines Written at Tintern Abbey’ might never have been.”

One cannot read “The Pleasures of Imagination” without becoming sensible that the writer was possessed of poetic feeling, and feeling of a kind that we generally agree to call romantic.  His doctrine at least, if not his practice, was in harmony with the fresh impulse which was coming into English poetry.  Thus he celebrates heaven-born genius and the inspiration of nature, and decries “the critic-verse” and the effort to scale Parnassus “by dull obedience.”  He invokes the peculiar muse of the new school: 

    “Indulgent Fancy, from the fruitful banks
    Of Avon, whence thy rosy fingers cull
    Fresh flowers and dews to sprinkle on the turf
    Where Shakspere lies.”

But Akenside is too abstract.  In place of images, he presents the reader with dissertations.  A poem which takes imagination as its subject rather than its method will inevitably remain, not poetry but a lecture on poetry—­a theory of beauty, not an example of it.  Akenside might have chosen for his motto Milton’s lines: 

        “How charming is divine philosophy! 
    Not harsh and crabbed, as dull fools suppose,
    But musical as is Apollo’s lute.”

Yet he might have remembered, too, what Milton said about the duty of poetry to be simple, sensuous, and passionate.  Akenside’s is nothing of these; it is, on the contrary obscure, metaphysical, and, as a consequence, frigid.  Following Addison, he names greatness and novelty, i.e., the sublime and the wonderful, as, equally with beauty, the chief sources of imaginative pleasure, and the whole poem is a plea for what we are now accustomed to call the ideal.  In the first book there is a passage which is fine in spirit and—­though in a less degree—­in expression: