endure, many duties otherwise too hard to fulfil; for there is poetry in every thing that is really good and true.  Happy those practical students of its beauties who have learned to track the ore beneath the most unpromising surfaces!  Poetry, I look upon, in fact, as the most essential, the most vital part of the cultivation of your mind, as from its spirit your character will receive the most beneficial influence:  you must learn the double lesson of extracting it from every thing, and of throwing it around every thing; and, for the better attainment of this object, you must study it in itself, that you may become deeply imbued with its spirit.

Along with the poetry of every age and of every nation, I would have you diligently study the criticisms of the masters of the art.  It is true that the intimate knowledge of all that has been written on this hackneyed subject will never supply the want of natural poetic taste, of that union of mental and moral refinement which produces the only infallible touchstone of the beautiful; still such criticisms will tend to refine and sharpen a natural taste, where it does exist; and without bringing its technical rules practically to bear upon the objects of your delighted admiration,[82] they will insensibly improve, refine, and subtilize the natural delicacy of your perceptions.

No criticisms can perhaps equal the masterly ones of Frederick Schlegel, or those of the less powerful but not less rich mind of Augustus William Schlegel,”—­those two wonderful brothers,” as a modern litterateur has justly called them.  Leigh Hunt, with perhaps more poetic originality, but with less accuracy of aesthetical perception, will be a useful guide to you in English poetry.  Burke’s “Treatise on the Sublime and Beautiful” will give you the most correct general ideas on the subject of taste.  These are always best and most influential after they have been for some time assimilated with the forms of the mind.  It is a far more useful exercise to apply them yourself to individual cases than merely to lend your attention, though carefully and fixedly, to the applications made for you by the writer.  Alison’s “Essay on Taste,” though interesting and improving, saves too much trouble to the reader in this way.

Your enjoyment and appreciation of poetry will be much heightened by having it read aloud,—­by yourself to yourself, if you should have no other sympathizing reader or listener.

The sound of the metre is essential to the full sense of the meaning and of the beauty of all poetry.  Even the rhymeless flow of blank verse is absolutely necessary to an accurate and entire perception of the effect the author intends to produce:  it is in both cases as the colouring to a picture.  It may be, indeed, that part of the composition which appeals most directly to the senses; but all the works of art must be imperfect which do not make this appeal; for, as I said before, all works of art are intended to affect our human nature.