that poetry, as distinguished from other modes of composition, does not
rest in metre, and that it is not poetry, if it make no appeal to our
passions or our imagination. One character belongs to all true poets,
that they write from a principle within, not originating in any thing
without; and that the true poet's work in its form, its shapings, and
its modifications, is distinguished from all other works that assume to
belong to the class of poetry, as a natural from an artificial flower,
or as the mimic garden of a child from an enamelled meadow. In the
former the flowers are broken from their stems and stuck into the
ground; they are beautiful to the eye and fragrant to the sense, but
their colours soon fade, and their odour is transient as the smile of
the planter;--while the meadow may be visited again and again with
renewed delight, its beauty is innate in the soil, and its bloom is of
the freshness of nature.

The next ground of critical judgment, and point of comparison, will be
as to how far a given poet has been influenced by accidental
circumstances. As a living poet must surely write, not for the ages
past, but for that in which he lives, and those which are to follow, it
is, on the one hand, natural that he should not violate, and on the
other, necessary that he should not depend on, the mere manners and
modes of his day. See how little does Shakspeare leave us to regret that
he was born in his particular age! The great aera in modern times was
what is called the Restoration of Letters;-the ages preceding it are
called the dark ages; but it would be more wise, perhaps, to call them
the ages in which we were in the dark. It is usually overlooked that the
supposed dark period was not universal, but partial and successive, or
alternate; that the dark age of England was not the dark age of Italy,
but that one country was in its light and vigour, whilst another was in
its gloom and bondage. But no sooner had the Reformation sounded through