grotesque, and to mistake the
absurd for the fanciful. By an excellent landscape-painter now living, I
was told that Darwin proposed as a subject for his pencil, a shower, in
which there should be represented a red-breast holding up an expanded
umbrella in its claws.

An Italian critic, following a division made by Plotinus, has
distributed the poets into three classes, which he calls the musical,
the amatorial, and the philosophic. In the first, he places those who
are studious of softness and harmony in their numbers; in the second,
such as content themselves with describing accurately the outward
appearances of real or fanciful objects; and in the third, those who
penetrate to the qualities of things, draw out their hidden beauties,
and separate what is really and truly fair from that which has only its
exterior semblance. Among the second of these, Darwin might claim for
himself no mean station. It was, indeed, a notion he had taken up, that
as the ideas derived from visible objects (to use his own words) are
more distinct than those derived from any other source, the words
expressive of those ideas belonging to vision make up the principal part
of poetic language. So entirely was he engrossed by this persuasion, as,
too frequently, to forget that the admirers of poetry have not only eyes
but ears and hearts also; and that therefore harmony and pathos are
required of the poet, no less than a faithful delineation of visible
objects.

Yet there is something in his versification also that may be considered
as his own. His numbers have less resemblance to Pope's, than Pope's to
those of Dryden. Whether the novelty be such as to reflect much credit
on the inventor, is another question. His secret, was, I think, to take
those lines in Pope which seemed to him the most diligently elaborated,
and to model his own upon them. But with those forms of verse which he
borrowed more particularly from Pope, in which one part is equally
balanced by the other, and of which each is complete in itself without
reference to those which precede or follow it, he has mingled one or two
others that had been used by our elder poets, but almost entirely
rejected by the refiners of the couplet measure till the time of
Langhorne; as where the substantive and its epithet are so placed, that
the latter makes the end of an iambic in the second, and the former the
beginning of a trochee in the third foot.

And showers | th[)e] st[=i]ll | sn[=o]w