ive in
sympathy. Every planet is not Mars or Saturn. There is also Venus and
Mercury. There is one genius of the south, and another of the north,
and others uniting both. The reader who is too thoughtless or too
sensitive to like intensity of any sort, and he who is too thoughtful
or too dull to like anything but the greatest possible stimulus of
reflection or passion, are equally wanting in complexional fitness
for a thorough enjoyment of books. Ariosto occasionally says as fine
things as Dante, and Spenser as Shakespeare; but the business of both
is to enjoy; and in order to partake their enjoyment to its full
extent, you must feel what poetry is in the general as well as the
particular, must be aware that there are different songs of the
spheres, some fuller of notes, and others of a sustained delight; and
as the former keep you perpetually alive to thought or passion, so
from the latter you receive a constant harmonious sense of truth and
beauty, more agreeable perhaps on the whole, though less exciting.
Ariosto, for instance, does not _tell a story_ with the brevity and
concentrated passion of Dante; every sentence is not so full of
matter, nor the style so removed from the indifference of prose; yet
you are charmed with a truth of another sort, equally characteristic
of the writer, equally drawn from nature and substituting a healthy
sense of enjoyment for intenser emotion. Exclusiveness of liking for
this or that mode of truth, only shows, either that a reader's
perceptions are limited, or that he would sacrifice truth itself to
his favourite form of it. Sir Walter Raleigh, who was as trenchant
with his pen as his sword, hailed the _Faerie Queene_ of his friend
Spenser in verses in which he said that 'Petrarch' was thenceforward
to be no more heard of; and that in all English poetry, there was
nothing he counted 'of any price' but the effusions of the new author.
Yet Petrarch is still living; Chaucer was not abolished by Sir Walter;
and Shakespeare is thought somewhat valuable. A botanist might as well
have said, that myrtles and oaks were to disappear, because acacias
had come up. It is with the poet's creations, as with nature's, great
or small. Wherever truth and beauty, whatever their amount, can be
worthily shaped into verse, and answer to some demand for it in our
hearts, there poetry is to be found; whether in productions grand and
beautiful as some great event, or some mighty, leafy solitude, or no
bigger