"Genius," says another authoritative writer in prose, "is caused by a
furious joy and pride of soul."

If, leaving the great names, we pass in review the worse poets we find,
in Pope's essay "On the Art of Sinking in Poetry," things like these,
gathered from the grave writings of his contemporaries:

In flaming heaps the raging ocean rolls,
Whose livid waves involve despairing souls;
The liquid burnings dreadful colours shew,
Some deeply red, and others faintly blue.

And a war-horse!

His eye-balls burn, he wounds the smoking plain,
And knots of scarlet ribbon deck his mane.

And a demon!

Provoking demons all restraint remove.

Here is more eighteenth-century "propriety":

The hills forget they're fixed, and in their fright
Cast off their weight, and ease themselves for flight.
The woods, with terror winged, out-fly the wind,
And leave the heavy, panting hills behind.

Again, from Nat Lee's _Alexander the Great_: