umption, "_having shown_ that much of what
his [Thomson's] biographer deemed genuine admiration, must, in fact,
have been blind wonderment--how is the rest to be accounted for?"
_"Having shown"!!!_ Why, he has shown nothing but his own arrogance in
supposing that his mere _ipse dixit_ will be taken by the whole world as
proof that Dryden and Pope had not the use of their eyes. "Strange to
think of an enthusiast," he says (alluding to the passage in Pope's
translation of the "Iliad"), "as may have been the case with thousands,
reciting those verses under the cope of a moonlight sky, without having
his raptures in the least disturbed by a suspicion of their
_absurdity_!" We are no enthusiasts--we are far too old for that folly;
but we have eyes in our head, though sometimes rather dim and motey, and
as good eyes, too, as Mr Wordsworth, and we often have recited--and hope
often will recite them again--Pope's exquisite lines, not only without
any "suspicion of their absurdity," but with the conviction of a most
devout belief that, with some little vagueness perhaps, and repetition,
and a word here and there that might be altered for the better, the
description is most beautiful. But grant it miserable--grant all Mr
Wordsworth has so dictatorially uttered--and what then? Though
descriptive poetry did not flourish during the period between "Paradise
Lost" and "The Seasons," nevertheless, did not mankind enjoy the use of
their seven senses? Could they not see and hear without the aid of those
oculists and aurists, the poets? Were all the shepherds and
agriculturists of England and Scotland blind and deaf to all the sights
and sounds of nature, and all the gentlemen and ladies too, from the
king and queen upon the throne, to the lowest of their subjects? Very
like a whale! Causes there were why poetry flowed during that era in
another channel than that of the description of natural scenery; and if
it flowed too little in that channel then--which is true--equally is it
true that it flows now in it too much--especially among the poets of the
Lake School, to the neglect, not of sentiments and affections--for there
they excel--but of strong direct human passion applied to the stir and
tumult--of which the interest is profound and eternal--of all the great
affairs of human life. But though the descriptive poets during the
period between Milton and Thomson were few and indifferent, no reason is
there in this world for imagining, with M