great poet ever wrote his poems in prose? or where is a good prose
poem, of any length, to be found? The poetry of the Bible is
understood to be in verse, in the original. Mr. Hazlitt has said a
good word for those prose enlargements of some fine old song, which
are known by the name of Ossian; and in passages they deserve what he
said; but he judiciously abstained from saying anything about the
form. Is Gesner's _Death of Abel_ a poem? or Hervey's _Meditations_?
The _Pilgrim's Progress_ has been called one; and, undoubtedly, Bunyan
had a genius which tended to make him a poet, and one of no mean
order: and yet it was of as ungenerous and low a sort as was
compatible with so lofty an affinity; and this is the reason why it
stopped where it did. He had a craving after the beautiful, but not
enough of it in himself to echo to its music. On the other hand, the
possession of the beautiful will not be sufficient without force to
utter it. The author of _Telemachus_ had a soul full of beauty and
tenderness. He was not a man who, if he had had a wife and children,
would have run away from them, as Bunyan's hero did, to get a place by
himself in heaven. He was 'a little lower than the angels', like our
own Bishop Jewells and Berkeleys; and yet he was no poet. He was too
delicately, not to say feebly, absorbed in his devotions, to join in
the energies of the seraphic choir.

Every poet, then, is a versifier; every fine poet an excellent one;
and he is the best whose verse exhibits the greatest amount of
strength, sweetness, straightforwardness, unsuperfluousness,
_variety_, and _oneness_;--oneness, that is to say, consistency, in
the general impression, metrical and moral; and variety, or every
pertinent diversity of tone and rhythm, in the process. _Strength_ is
the muscle of verse, and shows itself in the number and force of the
marked syllables; as,

Sonorous metal blowing martial sounds.

_Paradise Lost._

Behemoth, biggest born of earth, upheav'd
His vastness.

_Id._

Blow winds and crack your cheeks! rage! blow!
You cat[)a]r[)a]cts and hurricanoes, spout,
Till you have drench'd our steeples, drown'd the cocks!
You sulphurous and thought-executing fires,
Vaunt couriers of oak-cleaving thunderbolts,
Singe my white head! and thou, all-shaking thunder,
Strike flat the thick rotundity o' the world!