by no means to be taken for granted; otherwise Pope
would be superior to Fletcher, and Butler to Pope. Imagination,
teeming with action and character, makes the greatest poets; feeling
and thought the next; fancy (by itself) the next; wit the last.
Thought by itself makes no poet at all; for the mere conclusions of
the understanding can at best be only so many intellectual matters of
fact. Feeling, even destitute of conscious thought, stands a far
better poetical chance; feeling being a sort of thought without the
process of thinking,--a grasper of the truth without seeing it. And
what is very remarkable, feeling seldom makes the blunders that
thought does. An idle distinction has been made between taste and
judgement. Taste is the very maker of judgement. Put an artificial
fruit in your mouth, or only handle it, and you will soon perceive the
difference between judging from taste or tact, and judging from the
abstract figment called judgement. The latter does but throw you into
guesses and doubts. Hence the conceits that astonish us in the
gravest, and even subtlest, thinkers, whose taste is not proportionate
to their mental perceptions; men like Donne, for instance; who, apart
from accidental personal impressions, seem to look at nothing as it
really is, but only as to what may be thought of it. Hence, on the
other hand, the delightfulness of those poets who never violate truth
of feeling, whether in things real or imaginary; who are always
consistent with their object and its requirements; and who run the
great round of nature, not to perplex and be perplexed, but to make
themselves and us happy. And luckily, delightfulness is not
incompatible with greatness, willing soever as men may be in their
present imperfect state to set the power to subjugate above the power
to please. Truth, of any great kind whatsoever, makes great writing.
This is the reason why such poets as Ariosto, though not writing with
a constant detail of thought and feeling like Dante, are justly
considered great as well as delightful. Their greatness proves itself
by the same truth of nature, and sustained power, though in a
different way. Their action is not so crowded and weighty; their
sphere has more territories less fertile; but it has enchantments of
its own, which excess of thought would spoil,--luxuries, laughing
graces, animal spirits; and not to recognize the beauty and greatness
of these, treated as they treat them, is simply to be defect