it belongs to a philosophical critic to distinguish rather than
confound.

The first part of these remarks has related to poetry in its elements
and principles; and it has been shown, as well as the narrow limits
assigned them would permit, that what is called poetry, in a
restricted sense, has a common source with all other forms of order
and of beauty, according to which the materials of human life are
susceptible of being arranged, and which is poetry in a universal
sense.

The second part[13] will have for its object an application of these
principles to the present state of the cultivation of poetry, and a
defence of the attempt to idealize the modern forms of manners and
opinions, and compel them into a subordination to the imaginative and
creative faculty. For the literature of England, an energetic
development of which has ever preceded or accompanied a great and free
development of the national will, has arisen as it were from a new
birth. In spite of the low-thoughted envy which would undervalue
contemporary merit, our own will be a memorable age in intellectual
achievements, and we live among such philosophers and poets as surpass
beyond comparison any who have appeared since the last national
struggle for civil and religious liberty. The most unfailing herald,
companion, and follower of the awakening of a great people to work a
beneficial change in opinion or institution, is poetry. At such
periods there is an accumulation of the power of communicating and
receiving intense and impassioned conceptions respecting man and
nature. The persons in whom this power resides may often, as far as
regards many portions of their nature, have little apparent
correspondence with that spirit of good of which they are the
ministers. But even whilst they deny and abjure, they are yet
compelled to serve, the power which is seated on the throne of their
own soul. It is impossible to read the compositions of the most
celebrated writers of the present day without being startled with the
electric life which burns within their words. They measure the
circumference and sound the depths of human nature with a
comprehensive and all-penetrating spirit, and they are themselves
perhaps the most sincerely astonished at its manifestations; for it is
less their spirit than the spirit of the age. Poets are the
hierophants of an unapprehended inspiration; the mirrors of the
gigantic shadows which futurity casts upon the present; the words