emotions depends of course on the
richness of the imagination, and on its choice of those images which,
in combination, will be most effective, or, for the particular work to
be done, most fit. And it is altogether impossible for a writer not
endowed with invention to conceive what tools a true poet will make
use of, or in what way he will apply them, or what unexpected results
he will bring out by them; so that it is vain to say that the details
of poetry ought to possess, or ever do possess, any _definite_
character. Generally speaking, poetry runs into finer and more
delicate details than prose; but the details are not poetical because
they are more delicate, but because they are employed so as to bring
out an affecting result. For instance, no one but a true poet would
have thought of exciting our pity for a bereaved father by describing
his way of locking the door of his house:

Perhaps to himself at that moment he said,
The key I must take, for my Ellen is dead;
But of this in my ears not a word did he speak;
And he went to the chase with a tear on his cheek.[41]

In like manner, in painting, it is altogether impossible to say
beforehand what details a great painter may make poetical by his use
of them to excite noble emotions: and we shall, therefore, find
presently that a painting is to be classed in the great or inferior
schools, not according to the kind of details which it represents, but
according to the uses for which it employs them.

It is only farther to be noticed, that infinite confusion has been
introduced into this subject by the careless and illogical custom of
opposing painting to poetry, instead of regarding poetry as consisting
in a noble use, whether of colours or words. Painting is properly to
be opposed to _speaking_ or _writing_, but not to _poetry_. Both
painting and speaking are methods of expression. Poetry is the
employment of either for the noblest purposes.

This question being thus far determined, we may proceed with our paper
in the _Idler_.

"It is very difficult to determine the exact degree of enthusiasm that
the arts of Painting and Poetry may admit. There may, perhaps, be too
great indulgence as well as too great a restraint of imagination; if
the one produces incoherent monsters, the other produces what is full
as bad, lifeless insipidity. An intimate knowledge of the passions,
and good sense, but not common sense, must at last determine its
limits. It has