ll_ good, there is
no good. If they ever hope to do better, why do they trouble
us now? Let them rather courageously burn all they have done,
and wait for the better days. There are few men, ordinarily
educated, who in moments of strong feeling could not strike
out a poetical thought, and afterwards polish it so as to be
presentable. But men of sense know better than so to waste
their time; and those who sincerely love poetry, know the
touch of the master's hand on the chords too well to fumble
among them after him. Nay, more than this; all inferior
poetry is an injury to the good, inasmuch as it takes away
the freshness of rhymes, blunders upon and gives a wretched
commonalty to good thoughts; and, in general, adds to the
weight of human weariness in a most woful and culpable
manner. There are few thoughts likely to come across ordinary
men, which have not already been expressed by greater men in
the best possible way; and it is a wiser, more generous, more
noble thing to remember and point out the perfect words, than
to invent poorer ones, wherewith to encumber temporarily the
world.

Thus, when Dante describes the spirits falling from the bank of
Acheron 'as dead leaves flutter from a bough', he gives the most
perfect image possible of their utter lightness, feebleness,
passiveness, and scattering agony of despair, without, however, for an
instant losing his own clear perception that _these_ are souls, and
_those_ are leaves; he makes no confusion of one with the other. But
when Coleridge speaks of

The one red leaf, the last of its clan,
That dances as often as dance it can,

he has a morbid, that is to say, a so far false, idea about the leaf:
he fancies a life in it, and will, which there are not; confuses its
powerlessness with choice, its fading death with merriment, and the
wind that shakes it with music. Here, however, there is some beauty,
even in the morbid passage; but take an instance in Homer and Pope.
Without the knowledge of Ulysses, Elpenor, his youngest follower, has
fallen from an upper chamber in the Circean palace, and has been left
dead, unmissed by his leader, or companions, in the haste of their
departure. They cross the sea to the Cimmerian land; and Ulysses
summons the shades from Tartarus. The first which appears is that of
the lost Elpenor. Ulysses, amazed, and in exactly the spirit of bitter
and terrif