ritics, and
to those who _will be_ poets. Both are here addressed, and
indistinctively. But we may distinguish--nay, must--in turning verse into
prose. What is the counsel bestowed? "Meddle not with criticism, as a
professed or unprofessed critic, unless you are prepared to invade the
depths of criticism." "Touch not the lyre of Apollo to call forth a tone,
unless you are willing to put your hand under the most rigorous discipline
in the school of the musicians." What is the motive, the reason of the
counsel? The twofold monitory and hortatory counsel, proceeds upon a
twofold contemplation; upon the view of the beginning, and upon that of
the end.

A taste of criticism--the possession of half a dozen rules--the sitting,
for a few furtive and perilous instants, upon that august seat of high
judgment, before which the great wits of all ages and nations come to
receive their award--infatuates the youthful untempered brain with
dazzling, bewildering, and blinding self-opinion. Enough to mislead is
easily learned. Right dictates of clearest minds--oracles of the old
wisdom--crudely misunderstood. Rules of general enunciation made false in
the applying, by the inability of perceiving in the instance the
differencing conditions which qualify the rule, or suspend it. So, on the
other hand, canons of a narrower scope, stretched beyond their true
intent. And last, and worst of all, in the ignorance and in the disdain of
statutes, and sanctions, and preceding authoritative judgments--the
humours and fancies, the likings and the mislikings, the incapable
comprehension and the precipitate misapprehensions of an untrained,
uninstructed, inexperienced, self-unknowing spirit, howsoever of Nature
gifted or ungifted, to be taken for the standard of the worth which the
generations of mankind have approved, or which has newly risen up to
enlighten the generations of mankind!

Abstain, then, from judging, O Critic that wilt be! Humble thine
understanding in reverence! Open thy soul to beliefs! Yield up thy heart,
dissolving and overcome, to love! Cultivate self-suspicion! and learn!
learn! learn! The bountiful years that lift up the oak to maturity, shall
rear, and strengthen, and ripen thee! Knowledge of books, knowledge of
men, knowledge of Nature--and solicited, and roused, and sharpened, in the
manifold and studious conversation with books, and with men, and with
Nature--last and greatest--the knowledge of thyself--shall bring thee out