Akenside. If he could have conveyed to Thomson his melody and rhyme, and
Thomson would have paid him back in perspicuity and transparency of
meaning, how might they have enriched each other!"

"I confess," said I, "in reading Akenside, I have now and then found the
same passage at once enchanting and unintelligible. As it happens to
many frequenters of the opera, the music always transports, but the
words are not always understood." I then desired my friend to gratify us
with the first book of the Pleasures of Imagination.

Sir John is a passionate lover of poetry, in which he has a fine taste.
He read it with much spirit and feeling, especially these truly
classical lines,

_Mind, Mind_ alone, bear witness earth and heaven,
The living fountains in itself contains
Of beauteous and sublime: here hand in hand
Sit paramount the graces; here enthroned
Celestial Venus, with divinest airs
Invites the soul to never-fading joy.

"The reputation of this exquisite passage," said he, laying down the
book, "is established by the consenting suffrage of all men of taste,
though by the critical countenance you are beginning to put on, you look
as if you had a mind to attack it."

"So far from it," said I, "that I know nothing more splendid in the
whole mass of our poetry. And I feel almost guilty of high treason
against the majesty of the sublimer Muses, in the remark I am going to
hazard, on the celebrated lines which follow. The poet's object, through
this and the two following pages, is to establish the infinite
superiority of mind over unconscious matter, even in its fairest forms.
The idea is as just as the execution is beautiful; so also is his
supreme elevation of intellect, over

Greatness of bulk, or symmetry of parts.

Nothing again can be finer, than his subsequent preference of

The powers of genius and design,

over even the stupendous range

Of planets, suns, and adamantine spheres.

He proceeds to ransack the stores of the mental and the moral world, as
he had done the world of matter, and with a pen dipped in Hippocrene,
opposes to the latter,

The charms of virtuous friendship, etc.
* * * * *
The candid blush
Of him who strives with fortune to be just.
* * * * *
All the mild majesty of private life.

The graceful tear that streams from others' woes.