o submit to that of reason. He
can only abandon reality for the ideal; for liberty must hold to one or
the other of these anchors. But it is far from the real to the ideal;
and between the two is found fancy, with its arbitrary conceits and its
unbridled freedom. It must needs be, therefore, that man in general, and
the poet in particular, when he withdraws by liberty of his understanding
from the dominion of feeling, without being moved to it by the laws of
reason--that is, when he abandons nature through pure liberty--he finds
himself freed from all law, and therefore a prey to the illusions of
phantasy.

It is testified by experience that entire nations, as well as individual
men, who have parted with the safe direction of nature, are actually in
this condition; and poets have gone astray in the same manner. The true
genius of sentimental poetry, if its aim is to raise itself to the rank
of the ideal, must overstep the limits of the existing nature; but false
genius oversteps all boundaries without any discrimination, flattering
itself with the belief that the wild sport of the imagination is poetic
inspiration. A true poetical genius can never fall into this error,
because it only abandons the real for the sake of the ideal, or, at all
events, it can only do so at certain moments when the poet forgets
himself; but his main tendencies may dispose him to extravagance within
the sphere of the senses. His example may also drive others into a chase
of wild conceptions, because readers of lively fancy and weak
understanding only remark the freedom which he takes with existing
nature, and are unable to follow him in copying the elevated necessities
of his inner being. The same difficulties beset the path of the
sentimental genius in this respect, as those which afflict the career of
a genius of the simple order. If a genius of this class carries out
every work, obedient to the free and spontaneous impulses of his nature,
the man devoid of genius who seeks to imitate him is not willing to
consider his own nature a worse guide than that of the great poet. This
accounts for the fact that masterpieces of simple poetry are commonly
followed by a host of stale and unprofitable works in print, and
masterpieces of the sentimental class by wild and fanciful effusions,--a
fact that may be easily verified on questioning the history of
literature.

Two maxims are prevalent in relation to poetry, both of them quite
correct in themsel