as the earth has its mountains and its
valleys. But the inequalities of intellect, like the inequalities of the
surface of our globe, bear so small a proportion to the mass, that, in
calculating its great revolutions, they may safely be neglected. The sun
illuminates the hills, while it is still below the horizon, and truth is
discovered by the highest minds a little before it becomes manifest to
the multitude. This is the extent of their superiority. They are the
first to catch and reflect a light, which, without their assistance,
must, in a short time, be visible to those who lie far beneath them.

The same remark will apply equally to the fine arts. The laws on which
depend the progress and decline of poetry, painting, and sculpture,
operate with little less certainty than those which regulate the
periodical returns of heat and cold, of fertility and barrenness. Those
who seem to lead the public taste are, in general, merely outrunning
it in the direction which it is spontaneously pursuing. Without a just
apprehension of the laws to which we have alluded the merits and defects
of Dryden can be but imperfectly understood. We will, therefore, state
what we conceive them to be.

The ages in which the master-pieces of imagination have been produced
have by no means been those in which taste has been most correct. It
seems that the creative faculty, and the critical faculty, cannot exist
together in their highest perfection. The causes of this phenomenon it
is not difficult to assign.

It is true that the man who is best able to take a machine to pieces,
and who most clearly comprehends the manner in which all its wheels and
springs conduce to its general effect, will be the man most competent to
form another machine of similar power. In all the branches of physical
and moral science which admit of perfect analysis, he who can resolve
will be able to combine. But the analysis which criticism can effect
of poetry is necessarily imperfect. One element must for ever elude its
researches; and that is the very element by which poetry is poetry. In
the description of nature, for example, a judicious reader will easily
detect an incongruous image. But he will find it impossible to explain
in what consists the art of a writer who, in a few words, brings some
spot before him so vividly that he shall know it as if he had lived
there from childhood; while another, employing the same materials,
the same verdure, the same water, and