n's Campaign has been very
properly denominated a Gazette in rhyme. Common prose differs from
poetry, as treating for the most part either of such trite, familiar,
and irksome matters of fact, as convey no extraordinary impulse to the
imagination, or else of such difficult and laborious processes of the
understanding, as do not admit of the wayward or violent movements
either of the imagination or the passions.

I will mention three works which come as near to poetry as possible
without absolutely being so, namely, the Pilgrim's Progress, Robinson
Crusoe, and the Tales of Boccaccio. Chaucer and Dryden have translated
some of the last into English rhyme, but the essence and the power of
poetry was there before. That which lifts the spirit above the earth,
which draws the soul out of itself with indescribable longings, is
poetry in kind, and generally fit to become so in name, by being
"married to immortal verse." If it is of the essence of poetry to strike
and fix the imagination, whether we will or no, to make the eye of
childhood glisten with the starting tear, to be never thought of
afterwards with indifference, John Bunyan and Daniel Defoe may be
permitted to pass for poets in their way. The mixture of fancy and
reality in the Pilgrim's Progress was never equalled in any allegory.
His pilgrims walk above the earth, and yet are on it. What zeal, what
beauty, what truth of fiction! What deep feeling in the description of
Christian's swimming across the water at last, and in the picture of the
Shining Ones within the gates, with wings at their backs and garlands on
their heads, who are to wipe all tears from his eyes! The writer's
genius, though not "dipped in dews of Castalie," was baptised with the
Holy Spirit and with fire. The prints in this book are no small part of
it. If the confinement of Philoctetes in the island of Lemnos was a
subject for the most beautiful of all the Greek tragedies, what shall we
say to Robinson Crusoe in his? Take the speech of the Greek hero on
leaving his cave, beautiful as it is, and compare it with the
reflections of the English adventurer in his solitary place of
confinement. The thoughts of home, and of all from which he is for ever
cut off, swell and press against his bosom, as the heaving ocean rolls
its ceaseless tide against the rocky shore, and the very beatings of his
heart become audible in the eternal silence that surrounds him. Thus he
says,

"As I walked ab