though such as may be more easily assimilated to real
life. Idalia's 'velvet-green' has something of cant. An epithet or
metaphor drawn from Nature ennobles Art; an epithet or metaphor drawn
from Art degrades Nature. Gray is too fond of words arbitrarily
compounded. 'Many-twinkling' was formerly censured as not analogical;
we may say 'many-spotted,' but scarcely 'many-spotting.' This stanza,
however, has something pleasing.

"Of the second ternary of stanzas, the first endeavours to tell
something, and would have told it, had it not been crossed by
Hyperion; the second describes well enough the universal prevalence
of poetry; but I am afraid that the conclusion will not arise from
the premises. The caverns of the North and the plains of Chili are
not the residences of 'Glory and generous Shame.' But that Poetry and
Virtue go always together is an opinion so pleasing that I can
forgive him who resolves to think it true.

"The third stanza sounds big with 'Delphi,' and 'Aegean,' and
'Ilissus,' and 'Maeander,' and with 'hallowed fountains,' and 'solemn
sound;' but in all Gray's odes there is a kind of cumbrous splendour
which we wish away. His position is at last false: in the time of
Dante and Petrarch, from whom we derive our first school of poetry,
Italy was overrun by 'tyrant power' and 'coward vice;' nor was our
state much better when we first borrowed the Italian arts.

"Of the third ternary, the first gives a mythological birth of
Shakespeare. What is said of that mighty genius is true; but it is
not said happily: the real effects of this poetical power are put out
of sight by the pomp of machinery. Where truth is sufficient to fill
the mind, fiction is worse than useless; the counterfeit debases the
genuine.

"His account of Milton's blindness, if we suppose it caused by study
in the formation of his poem, a supposition surely allowable, is
poetically true and happily imagined. But the _car_ of Dryden, with
his _two coursers_, has nothing in it peculiar; it is a car in which
any other rider may be placed."

[Footnote 4: Sir James Mackintosh well says of Johnson's criticisms:
"Wherever understanding alone is sufficient for poetical criticism,
the decisions of Johnson are generally right. But the beauties of
poetry must be _felt_ before their causes are investigated. There is
a poetical sensibility, which in the progress of the mind becomes as
distinct a power as a musical ear or a picturesque eye. Without a
c