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the most various proportion. The incidents of a dramatic poem may be
scanty and ineffective, though the delineation of passion and
character may be of the highest order; as in Goethe's admirable
_Torquato Tasso_; or again, the story as a mere story may be well got
up for effect, as is the case with some of the most trashy productions
of the Minerva press: it may even be, what those are not, a coherent
and probable series of events, though there be scarcely a feeling
exhibited which is not represented falsely, or in a manner absolutely
commonplace. The combination of the two excellences is what renders
Shakespeare so generally acceptable, each sort of readers finding in
him what is suitable to their faculties. To the many he is great as a
story-teller, to the few as a poet.

In limiting poetry to the delineation of states of feeling, and
denying the name where nothing is delineated but outward objects, we
may be thought to have done what we promised to avoid--to have not
found, but made a definition, in opposition to the usage of language,
since it is established by common consent that there is a poetry
called descriptive. We deny the charge. Description is not poetry
because there is descriptive poetry, no more than science is poetry
because there is such a thing as a didactic poem. But an object which
admits of being described, or a truth which may fill a place in a
scientific treatise, may also furnish an occasion for the generation
of poetry, which we thereupon choose to call descriptive or didactic.
The poetry is not in the object itself, nor in the scientific truth
itself, but in the state of mind in which the one and the other may be
contemplated. The mere delineation of the dimensions and colours of
external objects is not poetry, no more than a geometrical ground-plan
of St. Peter's or Westminster Abbey is painting. Descriptive poetry
consists, no doubt, in description, but in description of things as
they appear, not as they are; and it paints them not in their bare and
natural lineaments, but seen through the medium and arrayed in the
colours of the imagination set in action by the feelings. If a poet
describes a lion, he does not describe him as a naturalist would, nor
even as a traveller would, who was intent upon stating the truth, the
whole truth, and nothing but the truth. He describes him by imagery,
that is, by suggesting the most striking likenesses and contrasts
which might occur to a mind contempl