Some Diversions of a Man of Letters by Edmund William Gosse
page 64 of 330 (19%)
page 64 of 330 (19%)
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of the classical school. "Avoid extremes," Pope had said, and
moderation, calmness, discretion, absence of excitement had been laid down as capital injunctions. Joseph Warton's very title, "The Enthusiast," was a challenge, for "enthusiasm" was a term of reproach. He was himself a scandal to classical reserve. Mant, in the course of some excellent lines addressed to Joseph Warton, remarks "Thou didst seek Ecstatic vision by the haunted stream Or grove of fairy: then thy nightly ear, As from the wild notes of some airy harp, Thrilled with strange music." The same excess of sensibility is still more clearly divulged in Joseph's own earliest verses:-- "All beauteous Nature! by thy boundless charms Oppress'd, O where shall I begin thy praise, Where turn the ecstatic eye, _how ease my breast That pants with wild astonishment and love_?" The Nature here addressed is a very different thing from the "Nature methodis'd" of the _Essay on Criticism_. It is not to be distinguished from the object of pantheistic worship long afterwards to be celebrated in widely differing language, but with identical devotion, by Wordsworth and Senancour, by Chateaubriand and Shelley. Closely connected with this attitude towards physical nature is the determination to deepen the human interest in poetry, to concentrate individuality in passion. At the moment when the Wartons put forth their |
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