So far as high poetic truth and seriousness are wanting to a poet's
matter and substance, so far also, we may be sure, will a high poetic
stamp of diction and movement be wanting to his style and manner. In
proportion as this high stamp of diction and movement, again, is absent
from a poet's style and manner, we shall find, also, that high poetic
truth and seriousness are absent from his substance and matter.

So stated, these are but dry generalities; their whole force lies in
their application. And I could wish every student of poetry to make the
application of them for himself. Made by himself, the application would
impress itself upon his mind far more deeply than made by me. Neither
will my limits allow me to make any full application of the generalities
above propounded; but in the hope of bringing out, at any rate, some
significance in them, and of establishing an important principle more
firmly by their means, I will, in the space which remains to me, follow
rapidly from the commencement the course of our English poetry with them
in my view.

Once more I return to the early poetry of France, with which our own
poetry, in its origins, is indissolubly connected. In the twelfth and
thirteenth centuries, that seed-time of all modern language and
literature, the poetry of France had a clear predominance in Europe. Of
the two divisions of that poetry, its productions in the _langue d'oïl_
and its productions in the _langue d'oc_, the poetry of the _langue
d'oc_,[88] of southern France, of the troubadours, is of importance
because of its effect on Italian literature;--the first literature of
modern Europe to strike the true and grand note, and to bring forth, as
in Dante and Petrarch it brought forth, classics. But the predominance
of French poetry in Europe, during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries,
is due to its poetry of the _langue d'oïl_, the poetry of northern