different from beauty in the abstract. Luxurious passive enjoyment or
torpid half-enjoyment must have been a comparatively rare condition of
his finely-strung, excitable, and fervid system. I believe that his
moral earnestness was too imperious to permit much of this. He was
capable indeed of the most passionate admiration of beauty, but even
that feeling seems to have been interpenetrated by a certain militant
apostolic fervor; his love was as the love of a religious soldier for
a patron saint who extends her aid and countenance to him in his wars.
I do not mean to say that his mind was in a perpetual glow: I mean
only that this surrender to impassioned transports was more
characteristic of the man than serene openness to influx of enjoyment.
His "Thoughts on Poetry and its Varieties," while clear and strenuous
as most of his thoughts were, are neither scientifically precise, nor
do they contain any notable new idea not previously expressed by
Coleridge, except perhaps the idea, that emotions are the main links
of association in the poetic mind: still his working out of the
definition of poetry, his distinction between novels and poems, and
between poetry and eloquence, is interesting as throwing light upon
his own poetic susceptibilities. He holds that poetry is the
delineation of the deeper and more secret workings of human emotion.
It is curious to find one who is sometimes assailed as the advocate of
a grovelling philosophy complaining that the chivalrous spirit has
almost disappeared from books of education, that the youth of both
sexes of the educated classes are growing up unromantic. "Catechisms,"
he says, "will be found a poor substitute for the old romances,
whether of chivalry or faery, which, if they did not give a true
picture of actual life, did not give a false one, since they did not
profess to give any, but (what was much better) filled the youthful
imagination with pictures of heroic men, and of what are at least as
much wanted,--heroic women."