the pleasure given by any poem or passage was derived, I estimated the
merit of such poem or passage. As the result of all my reading and
meditation, I abstracted two critical aphorisms, deeming them to
comprise the conditions and criteria of poetic style;--first, that not
the poem which we have read, but that to which we return, with the
greatest pleasure, possesses the genuine power, and claims the name of
essential poetry;--secondly, that whatever lines can be translated
into other words of the same language, without diminution of their
significance, either in sense or association, or in any worthy
feeling, are so far vicious in their diction. Be it however observed,
that I excluded from the list of worthy feelings, the pleasure derived
from mere novelty in the reader, and the desire of exciting wonderment
at his powers in the author. Oftentimes since then, in pursuing French
tragedies, I have fancied two marks of admiration at the end of each
line, as hieroglyphics of the author's own admiration at his own
cleverness. Our genuine admiration of a great poet is a continuous
undercurrent of feeling! it is everywhere present, but seldom anywhere
as a separate excitement. I was wont boldly to affirm, that it would
be scarcely more difficult to push a stone out from the Pyramids with
the bare hand, than to alter a word, or the position of a word, in
Milton or Shakespeare, (in their most important works at least,)
without making the poet say something else, or something worse, than
he does say. One great distinction, I appeared to myself to see
plainly between even the characteristic faults of our elder poets, and
the false beauty of the moderns. In the former, from Donne to Cowley,
we find the most fantastic out-of-the-way thoughts, but in the most
pure and genuine mother English, in the latter the most obvious
thoughts, in language the most fantastic and arbitrary. Our faulty
elder poets sacrificed the passion and passionate flow of poetry to
the subtleties of intellect and to the stars of wit; the moderns to