properly understood and employed, will help you incalculably over the
rugged paths of your daily life; it will shed softening and hallowing
gleams over many things that you would otherwise find difficult to
endure, many duties otherwise too hard to fulfil; for there is poetry in
every thing that is really good and true. Happy those practical students
of its beauties who have learned to track the ore beneath the most
unpromising surfaces! Poetry, I look upon, in fact, as the most
essential, the most vital part of the cultivation of your mind, as from
its spirit your character will receive the most beneficial influence:
you must learn the double lesson of extracting it from every thing, and
of throwing it around every thing; and, for the better attainment of
this object, you must study it in itself, that you may become deeply
imbued with its spirit.

Along with the poetry of every age and of every nation, I would have you
diligently study the criticisms of the masters of the art. It is true
that the intimate knowledge of all that has been written on this
hackneyed subject will never supply the want of natural poetic taste, of
that union of mental and moral refinement which produces the only
infallible touchstone of the beautiful; still such criticisms will tend
to refine and sharpen a natural taste, where it does exist; and without
bringing its technical rules practically to bear upon the objects of
your delighted admiration,[82] they will insensibly improve, refine, and
subtilize the natural delicacy of your perceptions.

No criticisms can perhaps equal the masterly ones of Frederick Schlegel,
or those of the less powerful but not less rich mind of Augustus William
Schlegel,"--those two wonderful brothers," as a modern littérateur has
justly called them. Leigh Hunt, with perhaps more poetic originality,
but with less accuracy of æsthetical perception, will be a useful guide