hich are unattainable by him; and endeavors occasionally to
surpass his original, in order to make some amends for the general
inferiority to which he feels that he must submit. But this would be
to encourage idleness and unmanly despair. Further, it is the language
of men who speak of what they do not understand; who talk of poetry as
of a matter of amusement and idle pleasure; who will converse with us
as gravely about a taste for poetry, as they express it, as if it were
a thing as indifferent as a taste for rope-dancing, or Frontignac, or
Sherry. Aristotle, I have been told, hath said that poetry is the most
philosophic of all writing; it is so: its object is truth, not
individual and local, but general and operative; not standing upon
external testimony, but carried alive into the heart by passion; truth
which is its own testimony, which gives strength and divinity to the
tribunal to which it appeals, and receives them from the same
tribunal. Poetry is the image of man and nature. The obstacles which
stand in the way of the fidelity of the biographer and historian, and
of their consequent utility, are incalculably greater than those which
are to be encountered by the poet who has an adequate notion of the
dignity of his art. The poet writes under one restriction only,
namely, that of the necessity of giving immediate pleasure to a human
being possest of that information which may be expected from him, not
as a lawyer, a physician, a mariner, an astronomer, or a natural
philosopher, but as a man. Except this one restriction, there is no
object standing between the poet and the image of things: between this
and the biographer and the historian there are a thousand.

Nor let this necessity of producing immediate pleasure be considered
as a degradation of the poet's art. It is far otherwise. It is an
acknowledgment of the beauty of the universe, an acknowledgment the
more sincere because it is not formal, but indirect; it is a task
light and easy to him who looks at the world in the spirit of love:
further, it is an homage paid to the native and naked dignity of man,
to the grand elementary principle of pleasure, by which he knows, and
feels, and lives, and moves. We have no sympathy but what is
propagated by pleasure. I would not be misunderstood, but wherever we
sympathize with pain it will be found that the sympathy is produced
and carried on by subtle combinations with pleasure. We have no
knowledge, that is, no ge