passionate." How awful is the power of words!--fearful often in their
consequences when merely felt, not understood; but most awful when both
felt and understood!--Had these three words only been properly
understood by, and present in the minds of, general readers, not only
almost a library of false poetry would have been either precluded or
still-born, but, what is of more consequence, works truly excellent and
capable of enlarging the understanding, warming and purifying the heart,
and placing in the centre of the whole being the germs of noble and
manlike actions, would have been the common diet of the intellect
instead. For the first condition, simplicity,--while, on the one hand,
it distinguishes poetry from the arduous processes of science, labouring
towards an end not yet arrived at, and supposes a smooth and finished
road, on which the reader is to walk onward easily, with streams
murmuring by his side, and trees and flowers and human dwellings to make
his journey as delightful as the object of it is desirable, instead of
having to toil, with the pioneers and painfully make the road on which
others are to travel,--precludes, on the other hand, every affectation
and morbid peculiarity;--the second condition, sensuousness, insures
that framework of objectivity, that definiteness and articulation of
imagery, and that modification of the images themselves, without which
poetry becomes flattened into mere didactics of practice, or evaporated
into a hazy, unthoughtful, daydreaming; and the third condition,
passion, provides that neither thought nor imagery shall be simply
objective, but that the _passio vera_ of humanity shall warm and animate
both.

To return, however, to the previous definition, this most general and
distinctive character of a poem originates in the poetic genius itself;
and though it comprises whatever can with any propriety be called a
poem, (unless that word be a mere lazy synonyme for a composition in