The story of his adventures would not make a poem like the Odyssey, it is true; but the relator had the true genius of a poet.  It has been made a question whether Richardson’s romances are poetry; and the answer perhaps is, that they are not poetry, because they are not romance.  The interest is worked up to an inconceivable height; but it is by an infinite number of little things, by incessant labour and calls upon the attention, by a repetition of blows that have no rebound in them.  The sympathy excited is not a voluntary contribution, but a tax.  Nothing is unforced and spontaneous.  There is a want of elasticity and motion.  The story does not “give an echo to the seat where love is throned.”  The heart does not answer of itself like a chord in music.  The fancy does not run on before the writer with breathless expectation, but is dragged along with an infinite number of pins and wheels, like those with which the Lilliputians dragged Gulliver pinioned to the royal palace.—­Sir Charles Grandison is a coxcomb.  What sort of a figure would he cut, translated into an epic poem, by the side of Achilles?  Clarissa, the divine Clarissa, is too interesting by half.  She is interesting in her ruffles, in her gloves, her samplers, her aunts and uncles—­she is interesting in all that is uninteresting.  Such things, however intensely they may be brought home to us, are not conductors to the imagination.  There is infinite truth and feeling in Richardson; but it is extracted from a caput mortuum of circumstances:  it does not evaporate of itself.  His poetical genius is like Ariel confined in a pine-tree, and requires an artificial process to let it out.  Shakspeare says—­

              “Our poesy is as a gum
      Which issues whence ’tis nourished, our gentle flame
      Provokes itself, and like the current flies
      Each bound it chafes.” [1]

I shall conclude this general account with some remarks on four of the principal works of poetry in the world, at different periods of history—­Homer, the Bible, Dante, and let me add, Ossian.  In Homer, the principle of action or life is predominant; in the Bible, the principle of faith and the idea of Providence; Dante is a personification of blind will; and in Ossian we see the decay of life, and the lag end of the world.  Homer’s poetry is the heroic:  it is full of life and action:  it is bright as the day, strong as a river.  In the vigour of his intellect, he grapples with all the objects of nature, and enters into all the relations of social life.