of the field, and adds a quickening and harmonizing spirit of its
own, which endows the sense with a power of sustaining its extreme
delight. The bucolic and erotic delicacy in written poetry is
correlative with that softness in statuary, music and the kindred
arts, and even in manners and institutions, which distinguished the
epoch to which I now refer. Nor is it the poetical faculty itself,
or any misapplication of it, to which this want of harmony is to
be imputed. An equal sensibility to the influence of the senses
and the affections is to be found in the writings of Homer and
Sophocles: the former, especially, has clothed sensual and pathetic
images with irresistible attractions. Their superiority over these
succeeding writers consists in the presence of those thoughts which
belong to the inner faculties of our nature, not in the absence
of those which are connected with the external: their incomparable
perfection consists in a harmony of the union of all. It is not
what the erotic poets have, but what they have not, in which their
imperfection consists. It is not inasmuch as they were poets, but
inasmuch as they were not poets, that they can be considered with
any plausibility as connected with the corruption of their age. Had
that corruption availed so as to extinguish in them the sensibility
to pleasure, passion, and natural scenery, which is imputed to them
as an imperfection, the last triumph of evil would have been achieved.
For the end of social corruption is to destroy all sensibility
to pleasure; and, therefore, it is corruption. It begins at the
imagination and the intellect as at the core, and distributes itself
thence as a paralysing venom, through the affections into the very
appetites, until all become a torpid mass in which hardly sense
survives. At the approach of such a period, poetry ever addresses
itself to those faculties which are the last to be destroyed, and
its voice is heard, like the footsteps of Astraea, departing from