into the same mental disease; if I had continued to pluck the flower
and reap the harvest from the cultivated surface, instead of delving
in the unwholesome quicksilver mines of metaphysic lore. And if in
after time I have sought a refuge from bodily pain and mismanaged
sensibility in abstruse researches, which exercised the strength and
subtilty of the understanding without awakening the feelings of the
heart; still there was a long and blessed interval, during which my
natural faculties were allowed to expand, and my original tendencies
to develop themselves;--my fancy, and the love of nature, and the
sense of beauty in forms and sounds.

The second advantage, which I owe to my early perusal, and admiration
of these poems, (to which let me add,) though known to me at a somewhat
later period, the Lewesdon Hill of Mr. Crowe bears more immediately on
my present subject. Among those with whom I conversed, there were, of
course, very many who had formed their taste, and their notions of
poetry, from the writings of Pope and his followers; or to speak more
generally, in that school of French poetry, condensed and invigorated
by English understanding, which had predominated from the last
century. I was not blind to the merits of this school, yet, as from
inexperience of the world, and consequent want of sympathy with the
general subjects of these poems, they gave me little pleasure, I
doubtless undervalued the kind, and with the presumption of youth
withheld from its masters the legitimate name of poets. I saw that the
excellence of this kind consisted in just and acute observations on
men and manners in an artificial state of society, as its matter and
substance; and in the logic of wit, conveyed in smooth and strong
epigrammatic couplets, as its form: that even when the subject was
addressed to the fancy, or the intellect, as in the Rape of the Lock,
or the Essay on Man; nay, when it was a consecutive narration, as in