meetings of 1844 is found in the second canto; it is an invocation to the modern Greeks: "Hereditary bondsmen! know ye not, Who would be free, themselves must strike the blow?" At the ball given in Brussels on the night before the advance on Waterloo, we read that "All went merry as a marriage bell." And it is said of the young French general, Marceau, that 66 "He had kept The whiteness of his soul, and so men o'er him wept." In this dream-land of sentiment, where the dry light of the intellect is variously colored and modified by the play of the emotions, the magnificent shadowy ideas of Wordsworth's "Ode on the Intimations of Immortality" find their appropriate home.1 3. Imagination and fancy are both intellectual faculties; and the main function of both is to detect and exhibit the resemblances which exist among objects of sense or intelligence. The difference between them, according to the doctrine of Coleridge, may be generally stated thus: that, whereas fancy exhibits only external resemblances, imagination loves to disclose the internal and essential relations which bind together things apparently uulike. Drayton's "Nymphidia" is the creation of a fancy the liveliest and most inventive, but shows little or no imaginative power. On the other hand, Shakspeare's "Venus and Adonis," Milton's L'Allegro," and the most perfect among Shelley's poems, are works of imagination. If we analyze the series of comparisons of which Shelley makes his "Skylark" the subject, we shall find that in every case 1 See p. 357. the likeness indicated lies deeper than the surface, and calls into play higher faculties than the mere intellectual reproduction of the impressions of sense :— "Like a poet hidden In the light of thought, Till the world is wrought To sympathy with hopes and fears it heeded not; Like a high-born maiden In a palace tower, Soul in secret hour With music sweet as love, which overflows her bower: Like a glow-worm golden In a dell of dew, Scattering unbeholden Its aërial hue Among the flowers and grass, which screen it from her view; Like a rose embowered In its own green leaves, By warm winds deflowered, Till the scent it gives Makes faint with too much sweet those heavy-winged thieves. Sound of vernal showers On the twinkling grass, Rain-awakened flowers, All that ever was Joyous and clear and fresh, thy music doth surpass." In "The Cloud," by the same poet, the imagery is partly fantastic, partly imaginative, as may be seen in the following extract: “That orbèd maiden with white fire laden, Glides glimmering o'er my fleece-like floor, And wherever the beat of her unseen feet, May have broken the woof of my tent's thin roof, And I laugh to see them whirl and flee, When I widen the rent in my wind-built tent, "I am the daughter of earth and water, And the nursling of the sky; I pass through the pores of the ocean and shores; I change, but I cannot die. For after the rain, when with never a stain The pavilion of heaven is bare, And the winds and sunbeams, with their convex gleams, I silently laugh at my own cenotaph, And out of the caverns of rain, Like a child from the womb, like a ghost from the tomb, 66 4. The philosophical is distinguished from the didactic poem by the absence of a set moral purpose. In the "Essay on Man," Pope starts with the design of vindicating the ways of God;" and, whatever may be thought of the mode of vindication, this design is adhered to throughout. Nor, again, does the philosophical poem, like the narrative or epic, embody a definite story, with beginning, middle, and end. Its parts may, indeed, be connected, as in the case of "The Excursion," by a slight narrative thread; but its characteristic excellence does not depend upon this, but upon the mode in which the different subjects and personages introduced are philosophically handled, and, it may perhaps be said, on the soundness of the philosophy itself. How far the pursuit of these objects is consistent with the full production of that kind of pleasure which it is the business of poetry to excite, is a question difficult of decision. CHAPTER II. PROSE WRITINGS. A ROUGH general classification and description of the subject-matter, with a few critical sketches of particular works or groups of works, is all that we shall attempt in the present volume. The prose writings of our literature may be arranged under the following six heads: 1. Works of fiction. 2. Works of satire, wit, and humor. 3. Oratory, with the connected departments of journal-writing and pamphleteering. 4. History; including, besides history proper, biography, and narrative works of all kinds, as subsidiary branches. 5. Theology. 6. Philosophy; including, besides philosophy proper, essays and political treatises, and all works of thought and theory, e.g., æsthetics and literary criticism. 1. Prose Fiction. By a work of fiction a narrative work is always understood. A fiction which describes not imaginary actions, but an imaginary state of things, such as More's "Utopia," must be considered as a work of thought and theory, and will fall under our sixth head. Works of fiction, then, or fictitious narratives, are of two kinds, those in which the agencies are natural, and those in which they are not. In the latter case they are called romances; in the former, stories of com mon life. Romances are either mock or serious; and mock romances may be either satirical, humorous, or comic. Stories of common life are divided into tales of adventure, and novels; the novel being in its highest and purest form the correlative in prose of the epic poem in poetry, and, like it, treating of "one great complex action, in a lofty style, and with fulness of detail." Whatever be its form, the novel must possess unity of plan, and is thereby distinguishable from the mere tale of adventure or travel, in which this unity is not required. Novels, again, may either refer to the past, in which case they are called historical novels, or to the present. If the latter, they admit of a further subdivision, according to the social level at which the leading characters move, into novels of high life, of middle life, and of low life. Further, there is a cross division applicable to the whole class of novels, into those of the artistic and those of the didactic kind. The following table exhibits the above classification of works of fiction at a glance: FICTITIOUS NARRATIVES. life. Richardson, Mrs. Gore. Novels of the present. 5. Novels of high 6. Novels of middle 7. Novels of low life. Fielding, Miss Austen. 1 See p. 343. life. Smollett. |