f the past, or vanishing generation. Now
and then we have a brilliant thought--even a certain number of verses
deserving the name of a poem; but there is no sustained poetical
power, nothing to mark an epoch, or glorify a name. When we commend,
it is some passage distinct from the poem, something small, and
finished, and complete in itself. The taste of the day runs more upon
conceits and extravagances, such as Cowley would have admired, and
which he might have envied. The suddenness of the impression, so to
speak, made by great poets, their direct communication with the heart,
belongs to another time. It is our ambition to come to the same end by
feats of ingenuity; and instead of touching the feelings, and setting
the imagination of the reader instantaneously aglow, to exercise his
skill in unravelling and interpretation. We expect the pleasure of
success to reward him for the fatigue.

The same feeling is at work, as we have already pointed out, in
decorative art; in which 'a redundancy of useless or ridiculous
ornament is called richness, and the inability to appreciate simple
and beautiful, or grand and noble forms, receives the name of genius.'
The connection is curious, likewise, between this ingenuity of poetry
and that of the machinery which gives a distinguishing character to
our epoch. It looks as if the complication of images, working towards
a certain end, were only another development of the genius that
invents those wonderful instruments which the eye cannot follow till
they are familiarly entertained--and sometimes not even then. If this
idea were kept in view, there would be at least some wit, although no
truth, in the common theory which attempts to account for the decline
of poetry. Neither advancement in science, however, nor ingenuity in
mechanics, is in itself, as the theory alleges, hostile to the
poetical; on the contrary, the materials of poetry multiply with the
progress of both. The prosaic character of the age does not flow from
these circumstances, but exists in spite of them. It has been said,
indeed, that the light of knowledge is unfavourable to poetry, by
making the hues and lineaments of the phantoms it calls up grow
fainter and fainter, till they are wholly dispelled. But this applies
only to one class of images. The ghost of Banquo, for instance, may
pale away and vanish utterly before the light of knowledge; but the
air-drawn dagger of Macbeth is immortal like the mind itself.
Knowl