on, or person, not our own. A man, to be
greatly good, must imagine intensely and comprehensively; he must put
himself in the place of another, and of many others: the pains and
pleasures of his species must become his own. The great instrument of
moral good is imagination; and poetry administers to the effect by
acting upon the cause.'

I would not willingly say anything after perorations like these; but
as treatises on poetry may chance to have auditors who think
themselves called upon to vindicate the superiority of what is termed
useful knowledge, it may be as well to add, that if the poet may be
allowed to pique himself on any one thing more than another, compared
with those who undervalue him, it is on that power of undervaluing
nobody, and no attainments different from his own, which is given him
by the very faculty of imagination they despise. The greater includes
the less. They do not see that their inability to comprehend him
argues the smaller capacity. No man recognizes the worth of utility
more than the poet: he only desires that the meaning of the term may
not come short of its greatness, and exclude the noblest necessities
of his fellow-creatures. He is quite as much pleased, for instance,
with the facilities for rapid conveyance afforded him by the railroad,
as the dullest confiner of its advantages to that single idea, or as
the greatest two-idea'd man who varies that single idea with hugging
himself on his 'buttons' or his good dinner. But he sees also the
beauty of the country through which he passes, of the towns, of the
heavens, of the steam-engine itself, thundering and fuming along like
a magic horse, of the affections that are carrying, perhaps, half the
passengers on their journey, nay, of those of the great two-idea'd
man; and, beyond all this, he discerns the incalculable amount of
good, and knowledge, and refinement, and mutual consideration, which
this wonderful invention is fitted to circulate over the globe,
perhaps to the displacement of war itself, and certainly to the
diffusion of millions of enjoyments.

'And a button-maker, after all, invented it!' cries our friend.

Pardon me--it was a nobleman. A button-maker may be a very excellent,
and a very poetical man too, and yet not have been the first man
visited by a sense of the gigantic powers of the combination of water
and fire. It was a nobleman who first thought of this most poetical
bit of science. It was a nobleman who first tho