rae_--a mere caprice or
sport of Nature.

But the philosophy of Poetry is not necessary to its existence any more
than the astronomy of the heavens is to the brilliancy of the sun or to
the splendors of a comet. A Poet is a creator, and his most perfect
creature is a portraiture of any work of God or man; of any attribute of
God or man in perfect keeping with Nature or with the original
prototype, be it in fact or in fiction, in repose or in operation.

Imitation is sometimes regarded as the test of poetic excellence. But
what is imitation but the creation of an image! Alexander Pope so well
imitates Homer, that, as an English critic once said, in speaking of his
translation of that Prince of Grecian Poets--'a time might come, should
the annals of Greece and England be confounded in some convulsion of
Nature, when it might be a grave question of debate whether Pope
translated Homer, or Homer Pope.'

For our own part, we have never been able to decide to our own entire
satisfaction, which excels in the true Heroic style. Pope, in his
translation of the exordium of Homer, we think more than equals Homer
himself:

'Achilles' wrath, to Greece the direful spring
Of woes unnumbered, heavenly goddess, sing!
That wrath which hurled to Pluto's dark domain
The souls of mighty chiefs in battle slain;
Whose limbs, unburied on the fatal shore,
Devouring dogs and hungry vultures tore;
Since great Achilles and Atrides strove,
Such was the sovereign doom and such the will of Jove.'[18]

We opine that Pope, being trammelled with a copy, and consequently his
imagination cramped, displays every attribute of poetic genius fully
equal, if not superior, to that of the beau ideal of the Grecian Muse.

But Alexander Pope, of England, is not the Pope of English Poetry, a
brother Poet being judge, for Dryden says:

'Three Poets, in three distant ages born,
Greece, Italy, and England did adorn;
The first in majesty of thought surpassed,
The next in melody--in both the last:
The force of Nature could no further go,
To make the third she joined the other two.'

And who awards not to Milton the richest medal in the Temple of the
Muses! Not, perhaps, for the elegant diction and sublime imagery of his
PARADISE LOST, but for his grand conceptions of Divinity in all its
attributes, and of humanity in all its conditions, past, present, and
future.

We Americans have a peculiar respect for Lyric Poetry. We have n