s a Peter Bell might describe them no less accurately than a
William Wordsworth. But in such songs of yours as you have permitted me
to hear, you seem to have escaped out of that elementary accidence
of the poet's art, and to touch, no matter how slightly, on the only
lasting interest which the universal heart of man can have in the song
of the poet; namely, in the sound which the poet's individual sympathy
draws forth from the latent chords in that universal heart. As for what
you call 'the world,' what is it more than the fashion of the present
day? How far the judgment of that is worth a poet's pain I can't pretend
to say. But of one thing I am sure, that while I could as easily square
the circle as compose a simple couplet addressed to the heart of a
simple audience with sufficient felicity to decoy their praises
into Max's begging-tray, I could spin out by the yard the sort of
verse-making which characterizes the fashion of the present day."

Much flattered, and not a little amused, the wandering minstrel turned
his bright countenance, no longer dimmed by a cloud, towards that of his
lazily reclined consoler, and answered gayly,--

"You say that you could spin out by the yard verses in the fashion of
the present day. I wish you would give me a specimen of your skill in
that handiwork."

"Very well; on one condition, that you will repay my trouble by
a specimen of your own verses, not in the fashion of the present
day,--something which I can construe. I defy you to construe mine."

"Agreed."

"Well, then, let us take it for granted that this is the Augustan age of
English poetry, and that the English language is dead, like the Latin.
Suppose I am writing for a prize-medal in English, as I wrote at
college for a prize-medal in Latin: of course, I shall be successful in
proportion as I introduce the verbal elegances peculiar to our Augustan
age, and also catch the prevailing poetic characteristic of that
classical epoch.

"Now I think that every observant critic will admit that the striking
distinctions of the poetry most in the fashion of the present day,
namely, of the Augustan age, are,--first, a selection of such verbal
elegances as would have been most repulsive to the barbaric taste of the
preceding century; and, secondly, a very lofty disdain of all prosaic
condescensions to common-sense, and an elaborate cultivation of that
element of the sublime which Mr. Burke defines under the head of
obscurity.

"