bird-beauty, and then proceeded to criticise the swan or the eagle;--not
less absurd is it to pass judgment on the works of a poet on the mere
ground that they have been called by the same class-name with the works
of other poets in other times and circumstances, or on any ground,
indeed, save that of their inappropriateness to their own end and being,
their want of significance, as symbols or physiognomy.

O! few have there been among critics, who have followed with the eye of
the imagination the imperishable yet ever wandering spirit of poetry
through its various metempsychoses, and consequent metamorphoses;--or
who have rejoiced in the light of clear perception at beholding with
each new birth, with each rare 'avatar', the human race frame to itself
a new body, by assimilating materials of nourishment out of its new
circumstances, and work for itself new organs of power appropriate to
the new sphere of its motion and activity!

I have before spoken of the Romance, or the language formed out of the
decayed Roman and the Northern tongues; and comparing it with the Latin,
we find it less perfect in simplicity and relation--the privileges of a
language formed by the mere attraction of homogeneous parts;--but yet
more rich, more expressive and various, as one formed by more obscure
affinities out of a chaos of apparently heterogeneous atoms. As more
than a metaphor,--as an analogy of this, I have named the true genuine
modern poetry the romantic; and the works of Shakspeare are romantic
poetry revealing itself in the drama. If the tragedies of Sophocles are
in the strict sense of the word tragedies, and the comedies of
Aristophanes comedies, we must emancipate ourselves from a false
association arising from misapplied names, and find a new word for the
plays of Shakspeare. For they are, in the ancient sense, neither
tragedies nor comedies, nor both in one,--but a different 'genus',