native powers, and what has he done, _for_, _by_, and _with_ them?

Now, that Pope possessed genius, and genius of a high order, we
strenuously maintain. But whether this amounted to creative power, the
highest quality of the poet, is a very different question. In native
imagination, that eyesight of the soul, which sees in the rose a richer
red, in the sky a deeper azure, in the sea a more dazzling foam, in the
stars a softer and more spiritual gold, and in the sky a more dread
magnificence than nature ever gave them, that beholds the Ideal always
shining through and above the Real, and that lights the poet on to form
within a new and more gorgeous nature, the fresh creation of his own
inspired mind, Pope was not only inferior to Chaucer, Shakspeare,
Spenser, and Milton, but to Young, Thomson, Collins, Burns, Wordsworth,
Keats, Shelley, Byron, Coleridge, and many other poets. His native
faculty, indeed, seems rather fine than powerful--rather timid than
daring, and resembles rather the petal of a rose peeping out into the
summer air, which seems scarce warm enough for its shrinking loveliness,
than the feather of the wing of a great eagle, dipping into the night
tempest, which raves around the inaccessible rock of his birthplace. He
was not eminently original in his thinking. In proof of this, many of
those fine sentiments which Pope has thrown into such perfect shape, and
to which he has given such dazzling burnish, are found by Watson (see
the "Adventurer") in Pascal and others. Shakspeare's wisdom, on the
other hand, can be traced to Shakspeare's brain, and no further,
although he has borrowed the plots of his plays. Who lent Chaucer his
pictures, fresh as dewdrops from the womb of the morning? Spenser's
Allegories are as native to him as his dreams; and if Milton has now and
then carried off a load which belonged to another, it was a load which
only a giant's arm could lift, and which he added to a caravan of
priceless wealth, the native inheritance of his own genius.