s generally even more marvellous than the
richness of his fancy), as an organic whole, but in her single and
accidental phenomena; and of ascribing not merely animal passions or
animal enjoyment, but human discursive intellect and moral sense, to
inanimate objects, and talking as if a stick or a stone were more of
a man than the poet is--as indeed they very often may be.

These, like everything else, are perfectly right in their own place--
where they express passion, either pleasurable or painful, passion,
that is, not so intense as to sink into exhaustion, or to be
compelled to self-control by the fear of madness. In these two
cases, as great dramatists know well enough, the very violence of the
emotion produces perfect simplicity, as the hurricane blows the sea
smooth. But where fanciful language is employed to express the
extreme of passion, it is felt to be absurd, and is accordingly
called rant and bombast: and where it is not used to express passion
at all, but merely the quiet and normal state of the poet's mind, or
of his characters, with regard to external nature; when it is
considered, as it is by most of our modern poets, the staple of
poetry, indeed poetic diction itself, so that the more numerous and
the stranger conceits an author can cram into his verses, the finer
poet he is; then, also, it is called rant and bombast, but of the
most artificial, insincere, and (in every sense of the word)
monstrous kind; the offspring of an effeminate nature-worship,
without self-respect, without true manhood, because it exhibits the
poet as the puppet of his own momentary sensations, and not as a man
superior to nature, claiming his likeness to the Author of nature, by
confessing and expressing the permanent laws of Nature, undisturbed
by fleeting appearances without, or fleeting tempers within. Hence
it is that, as in all insincere and effete times, the poetry of the
day deals more and more with conceits, and less and less with true
metaphors. In fact, hinc illae lachrymae. This is, after all, the
primary symptom of disease in the public taste, which has set us on
writing this review--that critics all round are crying: "An ill-
constructed whole, no doubt; but full of beautiful passages"--the
word "passages" turning out to mean, in plain English, conceits. The
simplest distinction, perhaps, between an image and a conceit is
this--that while both are analogies, the image is founded on an
analogy between the es