e whole the advances in art
made since the Restoration, they renewed the half-forgotten melody and
depth of tone which marked the best Elizabethan writers:--that,
lastly, to what was thus inherited they added a richness in language
and a variety in metre, a force and fire in narrative, a tenderness
and bloom in feeling, an insight into the finer passages of the Soul
and the inner meanings of the landscape, a larger sense of
Humanity,--hitherto scarcely attained, and perhaps unattainable even
by predecessors of not inferior individual genius. In a word, the
Nation which, after the Greeks in their glory, may fairly claim that
during six centuries it has proved itself the most richly gifted of
all nations for Poetry, expressed in these men the highest strength
and prodigality of its nature. They interpreted the age to
itself--hence the many phases of thought and style they present:--to
sympathize with each, fervently and impartially, without fear and
without fancifulness, is no doubtful step in the higher education of
the soul. For purity in taste is absolutely proportionate to
strength--and when once the mind has raised itself to grasp and to
delight in excellence, those who love most will be found to love most
wisely.

But the gallery which this Book offers to the reader will aid him more
than any preface. It is a royal Palace of Poetry which he is invited
to enter:

Adparet domus intus, et atria longa patescunt--

though it is, indeed, to the sympathetic eye only that its treasures
will be visible.

PAGE NO.

197 208 This beautiful lyric, printed in 1783, seems to anticipate in
its imaginative music that return to our great early age of song,
which in Blake's own lifetime was to prove,--how gloriously! that the
English Muses had resumed their 'ancient melody':--Keats, Shelley,
Byron,--he overlived them all.

199 210 _stout Cortez_: History would here suggest _Balboa_: (A.T.) It
may be noticed, that to find in Chapman's Homer the 'pure serene' of
the original, the reader must bring with him the imagination of the
youthful poet;--he must be 'a Greek himself,' as Shelley finely said
of Keats.

202 212 The most tender and true of Byron's smaller poems.

203 213 This poem exemplifies the peculiar skill with which Scott
employs proper names:--a rarely misleading sign of true poetical
genius.

213 226 Simple as _Lucy Gray_ seems, a mere narrative of what 'has
been, and may be again,' yet every touch in the ch