comes the short period of splendid and consummate excellence.
And then, from causes against which it is vain to struggle,
poetry begins to decline. The progress of language, which was at
first favourable, becomes fatal to it, and, instead of
compensating for the decay of the imagination, accelerates that
decay, and renders it more obvious. When the adventurer in the
Arabian tale anointed one of his eyes with the contents of the
magical box, all the riches of the earth, however widely
dispersed, however sacredly concealed, became visible to him.
But, when he tried the experiment on both eyes, he was struck
with blindness. What the enchanted elixir was to the sight of
the body, language is to the sight of the imagination. At first
it calls up a world of glorious allusions; but, when it becomes
too copious, it altogether destroys the visual power.

As the development of the mind proceeds, symbols, instead of
being employed to convey images, are substituted for them.
Civilised men think as they trade, not in kind, but by means of a
circulating medium. In these circumstances, the sciences improve
rapidly, and criticism among the rest; but poetry, in the highest
sense of the word, disappears. Then comes the dotage of the fine
arts, a second childhood, as feeble as the former, and far more
hopeless. This is the age of critical poetry, of poetry by
courtesy, of poetry to which the memory, the judgment, and the
wit contribute far more than the imagination. We readily allow
that many works of this description are excellent: we will not
contend with those who think them more valuable than the great
poems of an earlier period. We only maintain that they belong to
a different species of composition, and are produced by a
different faculty.