all the branches of physical and moral science which admit of
perfect analysis, he who can resolve will be able to combine.
But the analysis which criticism can effect of poetry is
necessarily imperfect. One element must for ever elude its
researches; and that is the very element by which poetry is
poetry. In the description of nature, for example, a judicious
reader will easily detect an incongruous image. But he will find
it impossible to explain in what consists the art of a writer
who, in a few words, brings some spot before him so vividly that
he shall know it as if he had lived there from childhood; while
another, employing the same materials, the same verdure, the same
water, and the same flowers, committing no inaccuracy,
introducing nothing which can be positively pronounced
superfluous, omitting nothing which can be positively pronounced
necessary, shall produce no more effect than an advertisement of
a capital residence and a desirable pleasure-ground. To take
another example: the great features of the character of Hotspur
are obvious to the most superficial reader. We at once perceive
that his courage is splendid, his thirst of glory intense, his
animal spirits high, his temper careless, arbitrary, and
petulant; that he indulges his own humour without caring whose
feelings he may wound, or whose enmity he may provoke, by his
levity. Thus far criticism will go. But something is still
wanting. A man might have all those qualities, and every other
quality which the most minute examiner can introduce into his
catalogue of the virtues and faults of Hotspur, and yet he would
not be Hotspur. Almost everything that we have said of him
applies equally to Falconbridge. Yet in the mouth of
Falconbridge most of his speeches would seem out of place. In
real life this perpetually occurs. We are sensible of wide