s far as
poetry has relation to the kindred arts of music and painting, to both
of which he was confessedly insensible, it could not be expected that he
should have much perception of its excellences. Of statuary, he said
that its value was owing to its difficulty; and that a fellow will hack
half a year at a block of marble to make something in stone that nearly
resembles a man. What shall be thought of his assertion, that before the
time of Dryden there was no poetical diction, no system of words at once
refined from the grossness of domestic use, and free from the harshness
of terms appropriated to particular arts, and "that words too familiar
or too remote, defeat the purpose of a poet?" It might with more show of
reason be affirmed, that in proportion as our writers have adopted such
a system as he speaks of, and have rejected words for no other cause
than that they were either too familiar or too remote, we have been
receding from the proper language of poetry. One of the chief ornaments,
or more properly speaking, the constituents of poetical language, is the
use of metaphors; and metaphors never find their way to the mind more
readily, or affect it more powerfully, than when they are clothed in
familiar words. Even a naked sentiment will lose none of its force from
being conveyed in the most homely terms which our mother tongue can
afford. They are the sounds which we have been used to from our infancy,
which have been early connected with our hopes and fears, and still
continue to meet us in our own homes and by our firesides, that will
most certainly awaken those feelings with which the poet is chiefly
concerned. As for the terms which Johnson calls remote, if I understand
him rightly, they too may be employed occasionally, either when the
attention is to be roused by something unusual, or for the sake of
harmony; or it may be for no other reason than because the poet chooses
thus to diversify his diction, so as to give a stronger relief to that
which is familiar and common, by the juxtaposition of its contrary. Of
this there can be no doubt, that, whoever lays down such arbitrary rules
as Johnson has here prescribed, will find himself mocked at every turn
by the power of genius, which meets with nothing in art or nature that
it cannot convert to its own use, and which delights to produce the
greatest effects by means apparently the most inadequate.

He particularly valued himself on the Life of Cowley, for the