y are not poetry, because they are not romance. The interest
is worked up to an inconceivable height; but it is by an infinite number
of little things, by incessant labour and calls upon the attention, by a
repetition of blows that have no rebound in them. The sympathy excited is
not a voluntary contribution, but a tax. Nothing is unforced and
spontaneous. There is a want of elasticity and motion. The story does not
"give an echo to the seat where love is throned." The heart does not
answer of itself like a chord in music. The fancy does not run on before
the writer with breathless expectation, but is dragged along with an
infinite number of pins and wheels, like those with which the Lilliputians
dragged Gulliver pinioned to the royal palace.--Sir Charles Grandison is a
coxcomb. What sort of a figure would he cut, translated into an epic poem,
by the side of Achilles? Clarissa, the divine Clarissa, is too interesting
by half. She is interesting in her ruffles, in her gloves, her samplers,
her aunts and uncles--she is interesting in all that is uninteresting.
Such things, however intensely they may be brought home to us, are not
conductors to the imagination. There is infinite truth and feeling in
Richardson; but it is extracted from a _caput mortuum_ of circumstances;
it does not evaporate of itself. His poetical genius is like Ariel
confined in a pine-tree, and requires an artificial process to let it out.
Shakspeare says--

"Our poesy is as a gum
Which issues whence 'tis nourished, our gentle flame
Provokes itself, and like the current flies
Each bound it chafes."[142]

I shall conclude this general account with some remarks on four of the
principal works of poetry in the world, at different periods of
history--Homer, the Bible, Dante, and let me add, Ossian. In Homer, the
principle of action or life is predominant; in the Bible, the principle of
faith and the idea of Providence; Dante is a personification of blind
will; and in Ossian we see the decay of life, and the lag end of the
world. Homer's poetry is the heroic: it is full of life and action: it is
bright as the day, strong as a river. In the vigour of his intellect, he
grapples with all the objects of nature, and enters into all the relations
of social life. He saw many countries, and the manners of many men; and he
has brought them all together in his poem. He describes his heroes going
to battle with a prodigality of life, arising fro