subsequently, Goldsmith, in the affecting yet somewhat enervate
simplicity of his verse, had obtained for Poetry a brief respite from
a school at once declamatory and powerless, and led her forth for a
"Sunshine Holiday" into the village green and under the hawthorn
shade. But, though the softer and meeker feelings had struggled into
a partial and occasional vent, those which partook more of passion and
of thought, the deep, the wild, the fervid, were still without "the
music of a voice." For the after century it was reserved to restore
what we may be permitted to call the spirit of our national
literature; to forsake the clinquant of the French mimickers of
classic gold; to exchange a thrice-adulterated Hippocrene for the pure
well of Shakspeare and of Nature; to clothe philosophy in the gorgeous
and solemn majesty of appropriate music; and to invest passion with a
language as burning as its thought and rapid as its impulse. At that
time reflection found its natural channel in metaphysical inquiry or
political speculation; both valuable, perhaps, but neither profound.
It was a bold, and a free, and an inquisitive age, but not one in
which thought ran over its set and stationary banks, and watered even
the common flowers of verse: not one in which Lucretius could have
embodied the dreams of Epicurus; Shakspeare lavished the mines of a
superhuman wisdom upon his fairy palaces and enchanted isles; or the
Beautifier [Wordsworth] of this common earth have called forth

"The motion of the spirit that impels
All thinking things, all objects of all thought;"

or Disappointment and Satiety have hallowed their human griefs by a
pathos wrought from whatever is magnificent and grand and lovely in
the unknown universe; or the speculations of a great but visionary
mind [Shelley] have raised, upon subtlety and doubt, a vast and