think, altogether unsatisfactory and
sophistical, is yet a splendid specimen of false reasoning, and
therefore worthy of being exposed and overthrown. Dr Johnson was not
often utterly wrong in his mature and considerate judgments respecting
any subject of paramount importance to the virtue and happiness of
mankind. He was a good and wise being; but sometimes he did grievously
err; and never more so than in his vain endeavour to exclude from the
province of poetry its noblest, highest, and holiest domain. Shut the
gates of Heaven against Poetry, and her flights along this earth will be
feebler and lower,--her wings clogged and heavy by the attraction of
matter,--and her voice--like that of the caged lark, so different from
its hymning when lost to sight in the sky--will fail to call forth the
deepest responses from the sanctuary of our spirit.

"Let no pious ear be offended," says Johnson, "if I advance, in
opposition to many authorities, that poetical devotion cannot often
please. The doctrines of religion may indeed be defended in a didactic
poem; and he who has the happy power of arguing in verse, will not lose
it because his subject is sacred. A poet may describe the beauty and the
grandeur of nature, the flowers of spring and the harvests of autumn,
the vicissitudes of the tide and the revolutions of the sky, and praise
his Maker in lines which no reader shall lay aside. The subject of the
disputation is not piety, but the motives to piety; that of the
description is not God, but the works of God. Contemplative piety, or
the intercourse between God and the human soul, cannot be poetical. Man
admitted to implore the mercy of his Creator, and plead the merits of
his Reedemer, is already in a higher state than poetry can confer.

"The essence of poetry is invention; such invention as, by producing
something unexpected, surprises and delights. The topics of devotion are
few, and being few are universally known: but few as they are, they can
be made no more; they can receive no grace from novelty of sentiment,
and very little from novelty of expression. Poetry pleases by exhibiting
an idea more grateful in the mind than things themselves afford. This
effect proceeds from the display of those parts of nature which attract,
and the concealment of those that repel, the imagination; but religion
must be shown as it is; suppression and addition equally corrupt it; and
such as it is, it is known already. From poetry the reader