y and touchingly,
_i.e._, poetically, describes. Wordsworth, indeed, never carried a
pedlar's pack, nor did Byron ever command a pirate ship, or Coleridge
shoot an albatross; but there were times and moods in which their
thoughts intently realised, and identified themselves with the
reflective wanderer, the impetuous Corsair, and the ancient mariner.
They felt _their_ feelings, thought _their_ thoughts, burned with
_their_ passions, dreamed _their_ dreams, and lived their lives, or died
their deaths. In relation to his creations, the poet is the omnific
spirit in whom they have their being. All their vitality must exist in
his life. He only, in them, displays to us fragments of himself. The
poem, in which a great poet should reveal the whole of himself to
mankind would be a study, a delight, and a power, for which there is yet
no parallel; and around which the noblest creations of the noblest
writers would range themselves as subsidiary luminaries.

These thoughts have been suggested by the work before us, which, though
evidently a hasty and imperfect sketch, has truth and life in it, which
gave us the thrill, and laid hold of us with the power, the sensation of
which has never yet failed us as a test of genius. Whoever the anonymous
author may be, he is a poet. A pretender to science cannot always be
safely judged of by a brief publication, for the knowledge of some facts
does not imply the knowledge of other facts; but the claimant of poetic
honours may generally be appreciated by a few pages, often by a few
lines, for if they be poetry, he is a poet. We cannot judge of the house
by the brick, but we can judge of the statue of Hercules by its foot. We
felt certain of Tennyson, before we saw the book, by a few verses which
had straggled into a newspaper; we are not less certain of the author of
Pauline.

Pauline is the recipient of the confessions: the hero is as anonymous as
the author, and this is no matter, for _poet_ is the title both of the
one and the other. The confessions have nothing in them which needs
names: the external world is only reflected in them in its faintest
shades; its influences are only described after they have penetrated
into the intellect. We have never read anything more purely
confessional. The whole composition is of the spirit, spiritual. The
scenery is in the chambers of thought: the agencies are powers and
passions; the events are transitions from one state of spiritual
existence to a