t standing between the Poet and the image
of things; between this, and the Biographer and Historian, there are a
thousand.

Nor let this necessity of producing immediate pleasure be considered as
a degradation of the Poet's art. It is far otherwise. It is an
acknowledgment of the beauty of the universe, an acknowledgment the more
sincere, because not formal, but indirect; it is a task light and easy
to him who looks at the world in the spirit of love: further, it is a
homage paid to the native and naked dignity of man, to the grand
elementary principle of pleasure, by which he knows, and feels, and
lives, and moves. We have no sympathy but what is propagated by
pleasure: I would not be misunderstood; but wherever we sympathise with
pain, it will be found that the sympathy is produced and carried on by
subtle combinations with pleasure. We have no knowledge, that is, no
general principles drawn from the contemplation of particular facts, but
what has been built up by pleasure, and exists in us by pleasure alone.
The Man of science, the Chemist and Mathematician, whatever difficulties
and disgusts they may have had to struggle with, know and feel this.
However painful may be the objects with which the Anatomist's knowledge
is connected, he feels that his knowledge is pleasure; and where he has
no pleasure he has no knowledge. What then does the Poet? He considers
man and the objects that surround him as acting and re-acting upon each
other, so as to produce an infinite complexity of pain and pleasure; he
considers man in his own nature and in his ordinary life as
contemplating this with a certain quantity of immediate knowledge, with
certain convictions, intuitions, and deductions, which from habit
acquire the quality of intuitions; he considers him as looking upon this
complex scene of ideas and sensations, and finding every where object
that immediately excite in him sympathies which, from the necessities of
his nature, are accompanied by an overbalance of enjoyment.

To this knowledge which all men carry about with them, and to these
sympathies in which, without any other discipline than that of our daily
life, we are fitted to take delight, the Poet principally directs his
attention. He considers man and nature as essentially adapted to each
other, and the mind of man as naturally the mirror of the fairest and
most interesting properties of nature. And thus the Poet, prompted by
this feeling of pleasure, which accomp