and more pretending than a sweet face or a bunch of violets;
whether in Homer's epic or Gray's _Elegy_, in the enchanted gardens of
Ariosto and Spenser, or the very pot-herbs of the _Schoolmistress_ of
Shenstone, the balms of the simplicity of a cottage. Not to know and
feel this, is to be deficient in the universality of Nature herself,
who is a poetess on the smallest as well as the largest scale, and who
calls upon us to admire all her productions; not indeed with the same
degree of admiration, but with no refusal of it, except to defect.

I cannot draw this essay towards its conclusion better than with three
memorable words of Milton; who has said, that poetry, in comparison
with science, is 'simple, sensuous, and passionate'. By simple, he
means unperplexed and self-evident; by sensuous, genial and full of
imagery; by passionate, excited and enthusiastic. I am aware that
different constructions have been put on some of these words; but the
context seems to me to necessitate those before us. I quote, however,
not from the original, but from an extract in the _Remarks on Paradise
Lost_ by Richardson.

What the poet has to cultivate above all things is love and
truth;--what he has to avoid, like poison, is the fleeting and the
false. He will get no good by proposing to be 'in earnest at the
moment'. His earnestness must be innate and habitual; born with him,
and felt to be his most precious inheritance. 'I expect neither
profit nor general fame by my writings,' says Coleridge, in the
Preface to his Poems; 'and I consider myself as having been amply
repaid without either. Poetry has been to me its "_own exceeding great
reward_"; it has soothed my afflictions; it has multiplied and refined
my enjoyments; it has endeared solitude; and it has given me the habit
of wishing to discover the good and the beautiful in all that meets
and surrounds me.'

'Poetry', says Shelley, 'lifts the veil from the hidden beauty of the
world, _and makes familiar objects be as if they were not familiar_.
It reproduces all that it represents; and the impersonations clothed
in its Elysian light stand thenceforward in the minds of those who
have once contemplated them, as memorials of that gentle and exalted
content which extends itself over all thoughts and actions with which
it co-exists. The great secret of morals is love, or a going out of
our own nature, and an identification of ourselves with the beautiful
which exists in thought, acti