at Brussels and New York; or to create a furor in ‘the Row’ on the day of publication, and turn bibliopolic premises into ‘overflowing houses.’  The public asks for glaring effects, palpable hits, double-dyed colours, treble X inspirations, concentrated essence of sentiments, and emotions up to French-romance pitch.  With such a public, what has our author in common?  While they make literary demands after their own heart, and expect every candidate for their not evergreen laurels to conform to their rules, Mr Taylor calmly unfolds his theory, that it is from ‘deep self-possession, an intense repose’ that all genuine emanations of poetic genius proceed, and expresses his doubt whether any high endeavour of poetic art ever has been or ever will be promoted by the stimulation of popular applause.[2] He denies that youth is the poet’s prime.  He contends that what constitutes a great poet is a rare and peculiar balance of all the faculties—­the balance of reason with imagination, passion with self-possession, abundance with reserve, and inventive conception with executive ability.  He insists that no man is worthy of the name of a poet who would not rather be read a hundred times by one reader than once by a hundred.  He affirms that poetry, unless written simply to please and pamper, and not to elevate or instruct, will do little indeed towards procuring its writer a subsistence, and that it will probably not even yield him such a return as would suffice to support a labouring man for one month out of the twelve.[3] Tenets like these are not for the million.  The propounder they regard as talking at them, not to them.  His principles and practice, his canons of taste, and his literary achievements, are far above out of their sight—­his merit they are content to take on trust, by the hearing of the ear, a mystery of faith alone.

Perhaps men shrewder than good Sir Roger de Coverley might aver that much is to be said on both sides—­that there may be something of fallacy on the part of poet as well as people in this controversy.  It is possible to set the standard too high as well as too low—­to plant it on an elevation so distant that its symbol can no longer be deciphered, as well as to fix it so low that its folds draggle in mire and dust.  If genius systematically appeal only to the initiated few, it must learn to do without the homage of the outer multitude.  For its slender income of fame, it has mainly itself to thank.  These remarks apply with primary force to that class of contemporary poets who delight in the mystic and enigmatical, and whose ideas are so apt to vanish, like Homer’s heroes, in a cloud—­among whom Robert Browning and Philip J. Bailey are conspicuous names; and in a secondary degree to that other class, lucid indeed in thought, and classically definite in expression, but otherwise too scholastic and abstract for popular sympathies—­among whom we may cite Walter Savage Landor and Henry Taylor.  Coleridge[4]