was it attracted the thousands to the launch? They might have seen the
poetical 'calm water' at Wapping or in the London lock or in the
Paddington Canal or in a horse-pond or in a slop-basin." Without natural
accessories--the sun, the sky, the sea, the wind--Bowles had said, the
ship's properties are only blue bunting, coarse canvas, and tall poles.
"So they are," admits Byron, "and porcelain is clay, and man is dust, and
flesh is grass; and yet the two latter at least are the subjects of much
poesy. . . . Ask the traveller what strikes him as most poetical, the
Parthenon or the rock on which it stands. . . . Take away Stonehenge
from Salisbury plain and it is nothing more than Hounslow Heath or any
other unenclosed down. . . . There can be nothing more poetical in its
aspect than the city of Venice; does this depend upon the sea or the
canals? . . . Is it the Canal Grande or the Rialto which arches it, the
churches which tower over it, the palaces which line and the gondolas
which glide over the waters, that render this city more poetical than
Rome itself? . . . Without these the water would be nothing but a
clay-coloured ditch. . . . There would be nothing to make the canal of
Venice more poetical than that of Paddington."

There was something futile about this whole discussion. It was marked
with that fatally superficial and mechanical character which
distinguished all literary criticism in Europe before the time of Lessing
in Germany, and of Wordsworth and Coleridge in England. In particular,
the cardinal point on which Pope's rank as a poet was made to turn was
really beside the question. There is no such essential distinction as
was attempted to be drawn between "natural objects" and "objects of
artificial life," as material for poetry. In a higher synthesis, man and
all his works are but a part of nature, as Shakspere discerned:

"Nature is made better by no mean