would be poets: Were it not better
to have written any one of those glorious lyrics than all which John
Keats has left behind him? And let them be sure that, howsoever they
may answer the question to themselves, the sound heart of the English
people has already made its choice; and that when that beautiful
"Hero and Leander," in which Hood has outrivalled the conceit-mongers
at their own weapons, by virtue of the very terseness, clearness, and
manliness which they neglect, has been gathered to the limbo of the
Crashawes and Marinos, his "Song of the Shirt" and his "Bridge of
Sighs" will be esteemed by great new English nations far beyond the
seas, for what they are--two of the most noble lyric poems ever
written by an English pen. If our poetasters talk with Wordsworth of
the dignity and pathos of the commonest human things, they will find
them there in perfection; if they talk about the cravings of the new
time, they will find them there. If they want the truly sublime and
the awful, they will find them there also. But they will find none
of their own favourite concetti; hardly even a metaphor; no taint of
this new poetic diction into which we have now fallen, after all our
abuse of the far more manly and sincere "poetic diction" of the
eighteenth century; they will find no loitering by the way to argue
and moralise, and grumble at Providence, and show off the author's
own genius and sensibility; they will find, in short, two real works
of art, earnest, melodious, self-forgetful, knowing clearly what they
want to say, and saying it in the shortest, the simplest, the
calmest, the most finished words. Saying it!--rather taught to say
it. For if that "divine inspiration of poets," of which the
poetasters make such rash and irreverent boastings, have indeed, as
all ages have held, any reality corresponding to it, it will rather
be bestowed on such works as these, appeals from unrighteous man to a
righteous God, than on men whose only claim to celestial help seems
to be that mere passionate sensibility, which our modern Draco once
described when speaking of poor John Keats, as an infinite hunger
after all manner of pleasant things, crying to the universe: 'Oh
that thou wert one great lump of sugar, that I might suck thee!'"

Our task is ended. We have given as plainly as we can our reasons
for the opinion which this magazine has expressed several times
already, that with the exception of Mr. Allingham, our young po