back on the speech which poetry had chosen for itself, was really for the purpose of getting behind that speech. The battle in all ages has been between poetry and rhetoric, and there is unconquered rhetoric enough among all romantics. But no one seriously mistook rhetoric for poetry, as many poets in many ages have done. Nature was accepted, yet strangeness was sought rather than refused, that salt which gives savour to life; and there was an arduous and discreet cultivation of that 'continual slight novelty? without which poetry cannot go on in any satisfactory way. Imagination was realised as being, what only Blake quite clearly said, reality; and the beauty of imagination the natural element of that which it glorifies. Poetry was realised as a personal confession, or as an evocation, or as 'an instant made eternity.' It was realised that the end of poetry was to be poetry; and that no story-telling or virtue or learning, or any fine purpose, could make amends for the lack of that one necessity. Thus it may be affirmed that in studying this period we are able to study whatever is essential in English poetry; that is, whatever is essential in poetry. JOHN HOME is known to every schoolboy by two lines in the play of 'Douglas': 'My name is Norval: on the Grampian Hills They occur in the second act, and are said in answer to the request: Blush not, flower of modesty As well as valour, to declare thy birth.' The lines are typical of a dramatist who, in his time, made theatrical successes in London and Edinburgh, and, by some strange delusion, led his contemporaries into an admiration which seems to us now unmerited and unintelligible. He shares with Joanna Baillie the doubtful honour of being compared with Shakespeare: she by Scott and he by Burns. DR. ERASMUS DARWIN (1731-1802) 2 In one of his notes to 'The Feast of the Poets' Leigh Hunt says: 'The late Dr. Darwin, whose notion of poetical music, in common with that of Goldsmith and others, was of the school of Pope, though his taste was otherwise different, was perhaps the first who, by carrying it to its extreme pitch of sameness, and ringing it affectedly in one's ears, gave the public at large a suspicion that there was something wrong 1 1 (1) Douglas, 1757. (2) Agis, Douglas, The Siege of Aquileia, 1760. (3) Collected Works, 3 vols. 1822. 2 (1) The Loves of the Plants, 1789. (2) The Economy of Vegetation, 1792 (the two parts of The Botanic Garden). (3) The Temple of Nature, 1803. (4) Poetical Works, 1807. in its nature.' No more deliberate endeavour of a prose mind to produce poetry of a formally accomplished kind has been seen than that of Dr. Darwin in his 'Botanic Garden,' who tells us that 'the general design of the following sheets is to enlist Imagination under the banner of Science.' In a prose 'interlude' to the second part of the poem, "The Loves of the Plants' (in which he professes to contend with Ovid, and metamorphose 'by similar art' his trees and flowers, 'after having remained prisoners so long in their respective vegetable mansions,' back into men and women), he gives us his theory of poetry, which is so identical with his practice that we cannot doubt of his satisfaction with his own work as a poet. 'The Muses are young Ladies,' he tells us; 'we expect to see them dressed; though not like some modern beauties, with so much gauze and feather, that "the Lady herself is the least part of her." But art is not to confine itself to nature: 'the further the artist recedes from nature, the greater novelty he is likely to produce.' The poet, it appears, 'writes principally to the eye'; and to prove his principle Darwin gives this instance: 'Mr. Pope has written a bad verse in the "Windsor Forest": "And Kennet swift for silver eels renowned.' The word renowned does not present the idea of a visible object to the mind, and is thence prosaic. But change the line thus: "And Kennet swift, where silver graylings play," and it becomes poetry, because the scenery is then brought before the eye.' So easy, and so plain a matter of rule, did it seem to the scientific poet to convert prose into poetry. Turn from the sections in his 'argument,' as for instance 'Pumps explained -Charities of Miss Jones - Departure of the Nymphs like water spiders,' to the statements in verse, and it will be seen that he is always striving to trace the passage of light over |