A DEFENCE OF POETRY AND OTHER ESSAYS

By Percy Bysshe Shelley

ON LOVEON LIFE IN A FUTURE STATEON THE PUNISHMENT OF DEATH SPECULATIONSON METAPHYSICS SPECULATIONSON MORALS ON THE LITERATURE, THE ARTS AND THE MANNERS OF THE ATHENIANSON THE SYMPOSIUM, OR PREFACE TO THE BANQUET OF PLATOA DEFENCE OF POETRY

ON LOVE

What is love? Ask him who lives, what is life? ask him who adores, what is God?

I know not the internal constitution of other men, nor even thine, whom I now address. I see that in some external attributes theyresemble me, but when, misled by that appearance, I have thoughtto appeal to something in common, and unburthen my inmost soul tothem, I have found my language misunderstood, like one in a distantand savage land. The more opportunities they have afforded me forexperience, the wider has appeared the interval between us, andto a greater distance have the points of sympathy been withdrawn. With a spirit ill fitted to sustain such proof, trembling and feeblethrough its tenderness, I have everywhere sought sympathy and havefound only repulse and disappointment. 

Thou demandest what is love? It is that powerful attraction towardsall that we conceive, or fear, or hope beyond ourselves, when wefind within our own thoughts the chasm of an insufficient void, and seek to awaken in all things that are, a community with what weexperience within ourselves. If we reason, we would be understood;if we imagine, we would that the airy children of our brain wereborn anew within another's; if we feel, we would that another'snerves should vibrate to our own, that the beams of their eyesshould kindle at once and mix and melt into our own, that lips ofmotionless ice should not reply to lips quivering and burning withthe heart's best blood. This is Love. This is the bond and thesanction which connects not only man with man, but with everythingwhich exists. We are born into the world, and there is somethingwithin us which, from the instant that we live, more and morethirsts after its likeness. It is probably in correspondence withthis law that the infant drains milk from the bosom of its mother;this propensity develops itself with the development of our nature. We dimly see within our intellectual nature a miniature as it wereof our entire self, yet deprived of all that we condemn or despise, the ideal prototype of everything excellent or lovely that we arecapable of conceiving as belonging to the nature of man. Not onlythe portrait of our external being, but an assemblage of the minutestparticles of which our nature is composed;[Footnote: These wordsare ineffectual and metaphorical. Most words are so--No help!] amirror whose surface reflects only the forms of purity and brightness;a soul within our soul that describes a circle around its properparadise, which pain, and sorrow, and evil dare not overleap. Tothis we eagerly refer all sensations, thirsting that they shouldresemble or correspond with it. The discovery of its antitype; themeeting with an understanding capable of clearly estimating our own;an imagination which should enter into and seize upon the subtleand delicate peculiarities which we have delighted to cherish andunfold in secret; with a frame whose nerves, like the chords oftwo exquisite lyres, strung to the accompaniment of one delightfulvoice, vibrate with the vibrations of our own; and of a combinationof all these in such proportion as the type within demands; thisis the invisible and unattainable point to which Love tends; andto attain which, it urges forth the powers of man to arrest thefaintest shadow of that, without the possession of which thereis no rest nor respite to the heart over which it rules. Hence insolitude, or in that deserted state when we are surrounded by humanbeings, and yet they sympathize not with us, we love the flowers, the grass, and the waters, and the sky. In the motion of the veryleaves of spring, in the blue air, there is then found a secretcorrespondence with our heart. There is eloquence in the tonguelesswind, and a melody in the flowing brooks and the rustling of thereeds beside them, which by their inconceivable relation to somethingwithin the soul, awaken the spirits to a dance of breathlessrapture, and bring tears of mysterious tenderness to the eyes, likethe enthusiasm of patriotic success, or the voice of one belovedsinging to you alone. Sterne says that, if he were in a desert, he would love some cypress. So soon as this want or power is dead, man becomes the living sepulchre of himself, and what yet survivesis the mere husk of what once he was. 

[1815; publ. 1840]

ON LIFE

Life and the world, or whatever we call that which we are and feel, is an astonishing thing. The mist of familiarity obscures from usthe wonder of our being. We are struck with admiration at some ofits transient modifications, but it is itself the great miracle. What are changes of empires, the wreck of dynasties, with theopinions which supported them; what is the birth and the extinctionof religious and of political systems to life? What are the revolutionsof the globe which we inhabit, and the operations of the elementsof which it is composed, compared with life? What is the universeof stars, and suns, of which this inhabited earth is one, and theirmotions, and their destiny, compared with life? Life, the greatmiracle, we admire not, because it is so miraculous. It is wellthat we are thus shielded by the familiarity of what is at onceso certain and so unfathomable, from an astonishment which wouldotherwise absorb and overawe the functions of that which is itsobject. 

If any artist, I do not say had executed, but had merely conceivedin his mind the system of the sun, and the stars, and planets, theynot existing, and had painted to us in words, or upon canvas, thespectacle now afforded by the nightly cope of heaven, and illustrated itby the wisdom of astronomy, great would be our admiration. Or hadhe imagined the scenery of this earth, the mountains, the seas, and the rivers; the grass, and the flowers, and the variety ofthe forms and masses of the leaves of the woods, and the colourswhich attend the setting and the rising sun, and the hues of theatmosphere, turbid or serene, these things not before existing, truly we should have been astonished, and it would not have been avain boast to have said of such a man, 'Non merita nome di creatore, se non Iddio ed il Poeta. ' But now these things are looked on withlittle wonder, and to be conscious of them with intense delight isesteemed to be the distinguishing mark of a refined and extraordinaryperson. The multitude of men care not for them. It is thus withLife--that which includes all. 

What is life? Thoughts and feelings arise, with or without our will, and we employ words to express them. We are born, and our birth isunremembered, and our infancy remembered but in fragments; we liveon, and in living we lose the apprehension of life. How vain is itto think that words can penetrate the mystery of our being! Rightlyused they may make evident our ignorance to ourselves, and this ismuch. For what are we? Whence do we come? and whither do we go? Isbirth the commencement, is death the conclusion of our being? Whatis birth and death?

The most refined abstractions of logic conduct to a view of life, which, though startling to the apprehension, is, in fact, that whichthe habitual sense of its repeated combinations has extinguishedin us. It strips, as it were, the painted curtain from this sceneof things. I confess that I am one of those who are unable to refusemy assent to the conclusions of those philosophers who assert thatnothing exists but as it is perceived. 

It is a decision against which all our persuasions struggle, and wemust be long convicted before we can be convinced that the soliduniverse of external things is 'such stuff as dreams are madeof. ' The shocking absurdities of the popular philosophy of mindand matter, its fatal consequences in morals, and their violentdogmatism concerning the source of all things, had early conductedme to materialism. This materialism is a seducing system to young andsuperficial minds. It allows its disciples to talk, and dispensesthem from thinking. But I was discontented with such a view ofthings as it afforded; man is a being of high aspirations, 'lookingboth before and after, ' whose 'thoughts wander through eternity, 'disclaiming alliance with transience and decay; incapable ofimagining to himself annihilation; existing but in the future andthe past; being, not what he is, but what he has been and shall be. Whatever may be his true and final destination, there is a spiritwithin him at enmity with nothingness and dissolution. This is thecharacter of all life and being. Each is at once the centre andthe circumference; the point to which all things are referred, andthe line in which all things are contained. Such contemplations asthese, materialism and the popular philosophy of mind and matteralike forbid; they are only consistent with the intellectual system. 

It is absurd to enter into a long recapitulation of argumentssufficiently familiar to those inquiring minds, whom alone a writeron abstruse subjects can be conceived to address. Perhaps the mostclear and vigorous statement of the intellectual system is to befound in Sir William Drummond's Academical Questions. 

After such an exposition, it would be idle to translate into otherwords what could only lose its energy and fitness by the change. Examined point by point, and word by word, the most discriminatingintellects have been able to discern no train of thoughts in theprocess of reasoning, which does not conduct inevitably to theconclusion which has been stated. 

What follows from the admission? It establishes no new truth, itgives us no additional insight into our hidden nature, neither itsaction nor itself. Philosophy, impatient as it may be to build, has much work yet remaining, as pioneer for the overgrowth of ages. It makes one step towards this object; it destroys error, and theroots of error. It leaves, what it is too often the duty of thereformer in political and ethical questions to leave, a vacancy. It reduces the mind to that freedom in which it would have acted, but for the misuse of words and signs, the instruments of its owncreation. By signs, I would be understood in a wide sense, includingwhat is properly meant by that term, and what I peculiarly mean. Inthis latter sense, almost all familiar objects are signs, standing, not for themselves, but for others, in their capacity of suggestingone thought which shall lead to a train of thoughts. Our whole lifeis thus an education of error. 

Let us recollect our sensations as children. What a distinct andintense apprehension had we of the world and of ourselves! Many ofthe circumstances of social life were then important to us whichare now no longer so. But that is not the point of comparison onwhich I mean to insist. We less habitually distinguished all thatwe saw and felt, from ourselves. They seemed as it were to constituteone mass. There are some persons who, in this respect, are alwayschildren. Those who are subject to the state called reverie, feelas if their nature were dissolved into the surrounding universe, or as if the surrounding universe were absorbed into their being. They are conscious of no distinction. And these are states whichprecede, or accompany, or follow an unusually intense and vividapprehension of life. As men grow up this power commonly decays, and they become mechanical and habitual agents. Thus feelings andthen reasonings are the combined result of a multitude of entangledthoughts, and of a series of what are called impressions, plantedby reiteration. 

The view of life presented by the most refined deductions of theintellectual philosophy, is that of unity. Nothing exists but asit is perceived. The difference is merely nominal between those twoclasses of thought, which are vulgarly distinguished by the namesof ideas and of external objects. Pursuing the same thread ofreasoning, the existence of distinct individual minds, similar tothat which is employed in now questioning its own nature, is likewisefound to be a delusion. The words _I_, YOU, THEY, are not signs ofany actual difference subsisting between the assemblage of thoughtsthus indicated, but are merely marks employed to denote the differentmodifications of the one mind. 

Let it not be supposed that this doctrine conducts to the monstrouspresumption that I, the person who now write and think, am that onemind. I am but a portion of it. The words _I_, and YOU, and THEY, are grammatical devices invented simply for arrangement, and totallydevoid of the intense and exclusive sense usually attached tothem. It is difficult to find terms adequate to express so subtlea conception as that to which the Intellectual Philosophy hasconducted us. We are on that verge where words abandon us, and whatwonder if we grow dizzy to look down the dark abyss of how littlewe know. The relations of THINGS remain unchanged, by whatever system. By the word THINGS is to be understood any object of thought, thatis any thought upon which any other thought is employed, with anapprehension of distinction. 

The relations of these remain unchanged; and such is the materialof our knowledge. What is the cause of life? that is, how was itproduced, or what agencies distinct from life have acted or actupon life? All recorded generations of mankind have weariedly busiedthemselves in inventing answers to this question; and the resulthas been, --Religion. Yet, that the basis of all things cannot be, as the popular philosophy alleges, mind, is sufficiently evident. Mind, as far as we have any experience of its properties, and beyondthat experience how vain is argument! cannot create, it can onlyperceive. It is said also to be the cause. But cause is only aword expressing a certain state of the human mind with regard tothe manner in which two thoughts are apprehended to be related toeach other. If any one desires to know how unsatisfactorily thepopular philosophy employs itself upon this great question, theyneed only impartially reflect upon the manner in which thoughtsdevelop themselves in their minds. It is infinitely improbable thatthe cause of mind, that is, of existence, is similar to mind. 

[1815; publ. 1840]

ON A FUTURE STATE

It has been the persuasion of an immense majority of human beingsin all ages and nations that we continue to live after death, --thatapparent termination of all the functions of sensitive and intellectualexistence. Nor has mankind been contented with supposing thatspecies of existence which some philosophers have asserted; namely, the resolution of the component parts of the mechanism of a livingbeing into its elements, and the impossibility of the minutestparticle of these sustaining the smallest diminution. They haveclung to the idea that sensibility and thought, which they havedistinguished from the objects of it, under the several namesof spirit and matter, is, in its own nature, less susceptible ofdivision and decay, and that, when the body is resolved into itselements, the principle which animated it will remain perpetualand unchanged. Some philosophers-and those to whom we are indebtedfor the most stupendous discoveries in physical science, suppose, on the other hand, that intelligence is the mere result of certaincombinations among the particles of its objects; and those amongthem who believe that we live after death, recur to the interpositionof a supernatural power, which shall overcome the tendency inherentin all material combinations, to dissipate and be absorbed intoother forms. 

Let us trace the reasonings which in one and the other have conductedto these two opinions, and endeavour to discover what we ought tothink on a question of such momentous interest. Let us analyse theideas and feelings which constitute the contending beliefs, andwatchfully establish a discrimination between words and thoughts. Let us bring the question to the test of experience and fact; andask ourselves, considering our nature in its entire extent, whatlight we derive from a sustained and comprehensive view of itscomponent parts, which may enable, us to assert, with certainty, that we do or do not live after death. 

The examination of this subject requires that it should be striptof all those accessory topics which adhere to it in the common opinionof men. The existence of a God, and a future state of rewards andpunishments, are totally foreign to the subject. If it be provedthat the world is ruled by a Divine Power, no inference necessarilycan be drawn from that circumstance in favour of a future state. It has been asserted, indeed, that as goodness and justice are tobe numbered among the attributes of the Deity, He will undoubtedlycompensate the virtuous who suffer during life, and that He willmake every sensitive being who does not deserve punishment, happyfor ever. But this view of the subject, which it would be tediousas well as superfluous to develop and expose, satisfies no person, and cuts the knot which we now seek to untie. Moreover, should itbe proved, on the other hand, that the mysterious principle whichregulates the proceedings of the universe, is neither intelligentnor sensitive, yet it is not an inconsistency to suppose at thesame time, that the animating power survives the body which ithas animated, by laws as independent of any supernatural agent asthose through which it first became united with it. Nor, if a futurestate be clearly proved, does it follow that it will be a state ofpunishment or reward. 

By the word death, we express that condition in which naturesresembling ourselves apparently cease to be that which they were. We no longer hear them speak, nor see them move. If they havesensations and apprehensions, we no longer participate in them. We know no more than that those external organs, and all that finetexture of material frame, without which we have no experience thatlife or thought can subsist, are dissolved and scattered abroad. The body is placed under the earth, and after a certain period thereremains no vestige even of its form. This is that contemplationof inexhaustible melancholy, whose shadow eclipses the brightnessof the world. The common observer is struck with dejection at thespectacle. He contends in vain against the persuasion of the grave, that the dead indeed cease to be. The corpse at his feet is propheticof his own destiny. Those who have preceded him, and whose voicewas delightful to his ear; whose touch met his like sweet and subtlefire; whose aspect spread a visionary light upon his path--thesehe cannot meet again. The organs of sense are destroyed, and theintellectual operations dependent on them have perished with theirsources. How can a corpse see or feel? its eyes are eaten out, andits heart is black and without motion. What intercourse can twoheaps of putrid clay and crumbling bones hold together? When youcan discover where the fresh colours of the faded flower abide, or the music of the broken lyre, seek life among the dead. Suchare the anxious and fearful contemplations of the common observer, though the popular religion often prevents him from confessing themeven to himself. 

The natural philosopher, in addition to the sensations commonto all men inspired by the event of death, believes that he seeswith more certainty that it is attended with the annihilation ofsentiment and thought. He observes the mental powers increase andfade with those of the body, and even accommodate themselves tothe most transitory changes of our physical nature. Sleep suspendsmany of the faculties of the vital and intellectual principle;drunkenness and disease will either temporarily or permanentlyderange them. Madness or idiotcy may utterly extinguish the mostexcellent and delicate of those powers. In old age the mind graduallywithers; and as it grew and was strengthened with the body, so doesit together with the body sink into decrepitude. Assuredly theseare convincing evidences that so soon as the organs of the bodyare subjected to the laws of inanimate matter, sensation, andperception, and apprehension, are at an end. It is probable thatwhat we call thought is not an actual being, but no more than therelation between certain parts of that infinitely varied mass, of which the rest of the universe is composed, and which ceasesto exist so soon as those parts change their position with regardto each other. Thus colour, and sound, and taste, and odour existonly relatively. But let thought be considered as some peculiarsubstance, which permeates, and is the cause of, the animation ofliving beings. Why should that substance be assumed to be somethingessentially distinct from all others, and exempt from subjectionto those laws from which no other substance is exempt? It differs, indeed, from all other substances, as electricity, and light, andmagnetism, and the constituent parts of air and earth, severallydiffer from all others. Each of these is subject to change andto decay, and to conversion into other forms. Yet the differencebetween light and earth is scarcely greater than that which existsbetween life, or thought, and fire. The difference between the twoformer was never alleged as an argument for the eternal permanenceof either, in that form under which they first might offer themselvesto our notice. Why should the difference between the two lattersubstances be an argument for the prolongation of the existenceof one and not the other, when the existence of both has arrivedat their apparent termination? To say that fire exists withoutmanifesting any of the properties of fire, such as light, heat, etc. , or that the principle of life exists without consciousness, or memory, or desire, or motive, is to resign, by an awkwarddistortion of language, the affirmative of the dispute. To saythat the principle of life MAY exist in distribution among variousforms, is to assert what cannot be proved to be either true orfalse, but which, were it true, annihilates all hope of existenceafter death, in any sense in which that event can belong to thehopes and fears of men. Suppose, however, that the intellectualand vital principle differs in the most marked and essential mannerfrom all other known substances; that they have all some resemblancebetween themselves which it in no degree participates. In what mannercan this concession be made an argument for its imperishability?All that we see or know perishes and is changed. Life and thoughtdiffer indeed from everything else. But that it survives thatperiod, beyond which we have no experience of its existence, suchdistinction and dissimilarity affords no shadow of proof, and nothingbut our own desires could have led us to conjecture or imagine. Have we existed before birth? It is difficult to conceive thepossibility of this. There is, in the generative principle of eachanimal and plant, a power which converts the substances by whichit is surrounded into a substance homogeneous with itself. Thatis, the relations between certain elementary particles of matterundergo a change, and submit to new combinations. For when we usethe words PRINCIPLE, POWER, CAUSE, we mean to express no real being, but only to class under those terms a certain series of co-existingphenomena; but let it be supposed that this principle is a certainsubstance which escapes the observation of the chemist and anatomist. It certainly MAY BE; though it is sufficiently unphilosophicalto allege the possibility of an opinion as a proof of its truth. Does it see, hear, feel, before its combination with those organson which sensation depends? Does it reason, imagine, apprehend, without those ideas which sensation alone can communicate? If wehave not existed before birth; if, at the period when the partsof our nature on which thought and life depend, seem to be woventogether; if there are no reasons to suppose that we have existedbefore that period at which our existence apparently commences, then there are no grounds for supposition that we shall continueto exist after our existence has apparently ceased. So far asthought is concerned, the same will take place with regard to use, individually considered, after death, as had place before our birth. 

It is said that it, is possible that we should continue to existin some mode totally inconceivable to us at present. This is a mostunreasonable presumption. It casts on the adherents of annihilationthe burthen of proving the negative of a question, the affirmativeof which is not supported by a single argument, and which, by itsvery nature, lies beyond the experience of the human understanding. It is sufficiently easy, indeed, to form any proposition, concerningwhich we are ignorant, just not so absurd as not to be contradictoryin itself, and defy refutation. The possibility of whatever entersinto the wildest imagination to conceive is thus triumphantlyvindicated. But it is enough that such assertions should be eithercontradictory to the known laws of nature, or exceed the limits of ourexperience, that their fallacy or irrelevancy to our considerationshould be demonstrated. They persuade, indeed, only those whodesire to be persuaded. This desire to be for ever as we are; thereluctance to a violent and unexperienced change, which is commonto all the animated and inanimate combinations of the universe, is, indeed, the secret persuasion which has given birth to the opinionsof a future state. 

[1815; publ. 1840]

ON THE PUNISHMENT OF DEATH

A FRAGMENT

The first law which it becomes a Reformer to propose and support, at the approach of a period of great political change, is theabolition of the punishment of death. 

It is sufficiently clear that revenge, retaliation, atonement, expiation, are rules and motives, so far from deserving a place inany enlightened system of political life, that they are the chiefsources of a prodigious class of miseries in the domestic circlesof society. It is clear that however the spirit of legislation mayappear to frame institutions upon more philosophical maxims, ithas hitherto, in those cases which are termed criminal, done littlemore than palliate the spirit, by gratifying a portion of it; andafforded a compromise between that which is bests--the inflictingof no evil upon a sensitive being, without a decisively beneficialresult in which he should at least participates--and that which isworst; that he should be put to torture for the amusement of thosewhom he may have injured, or may seem to have injured. 

Omitting these remoter considerations, let us inquire what, DEATHis; that punishment which is applied as a measure of transgressionsof indefinite shades of distinction, so soon as they shall havepassed that degree and colour of enormity, with which it is supposedno, inferior infliction is commensurate. 

And first, whether death is good or evil, a punishment or a reward, or whether it be wholly indifferent, no man can take upon himselfto assert. That that within us which thinks and feels, continuesto think and feel after the dissolution of the body, has been thealmost universal opinion of mankind, and the accurate philosophyof what I may be permitted to term the modern Academy, by showingthe prodigious depth and extent of our ignorance respecting thecauses and nature of sensation, renders probable the affirmativeof a proposition, the negative of which it is so difficult toconceive, and the popular arguments against which, derived fromwhat is called the atomic system, are proved to be applicable onlyto the relation which one object bears to another, as apprehendedby the mind, and not to existence itself, or the nature of thatessence which is the medium and receptacle of objects. 

The popular system of religion suggests the idea that the mind, after death, will be painfully or pleasurably affected according toits determinations during life. However ridiculous and perniciouswe must admit the vulgar accessories of this creed to be, thereis a certain analogy, not wholly absurd, between the consequencesresulting to an individual during life from the virtuous or vicious, prudent or imprudent, conduct of his external actions, to thoseconsequences which are conjectured to ensue from the disciplineand order of his internal thoughts, as affecting his condition ina future state. They omit, indeed, to calculate upon the accidentsof disease, and temperament, and organization, and circumstance, together with the multitude of independent agencies which affectthe opinions, the conduct, and the happiness of individuals, andproduce determinations of the will, and modify the judgement, soas to produce effects the most opposite in natures considerablysimilar. These are those operations in the order of the whole ofnature, tending, we are prone to believe, to some definite mightyend, to which the agencies of our peculiar nature are subordinate;nor is there any reason to suppose, that in a future state they shouldbecome suddenly exempt from that subordination. The philosopher isunable to determine whether our existence in a previous state hasaffected our present condition, and abstains from deciding whetherour present condition will affect us in that which may be future. That, if we continue to exist, the manner of our existence will besuch as no inferences nor conjectures, afforded by a considerationof our earthly experience, can elucidate, is sufficiently obvious. The opinion that the vital principle within us, in whatever modeit may continue to exist, must lose that consciousness of definiteand individual being which now characterizes it, and become a unitin the vast sum of action and of thought which disposes and animatesthe universe, and is called God, seems to belong to that class ofopinion which has been designated as indifferent. 

To compel a person to know all that can be known by the deadconcerning that which the living fear, hope, or forget; to plungehim into the pleasure or pain which there awaits him; to punish orreward him in a manner and in a degree incalculable and incomprehensibleby us; to disrobe him at once from all that intertexture of goodand evil with which Nature seems to have clothed every form ofindividual existence, is to inflict on him the doom of death. 

A certain degree of pain and terror usually accompany the inflictionof death. This degree is infinitely varied by the infinite varietyin the temperament and opinions of the sufferers. As a measure ofpunishment, strictly so considered, and as an exhibition, which, byits known effects on the sensibility of the sufferer, is intendedto intimidate the spectators from incurring a similar liability, it is singularly inadequate. 

Firstly, Persons of energetic character, in whom, as in men whosuffer for political crimes, there is a large mixture of enterprise, and fortitude, and disinterestedness, and the elements, thoughmisguided and disarranged, by which the strength and happiness of anation might have been cemented, die in such a manner, as to makedeath appear not evil, but good. The death of what is called atraitor, that is, a person who, from whatever motive, would abolishthe government of the day, is as often a triumphant exhibitionof suffering virtue, as the warning of a culprit. The multitude, instead of departing with a panic-stricken approbation of the lawswhich exhibited such a spectacle, are inspired with pity, admirationand sympathy; and the most generous among them feel an emulationto be the authors of such flattering emotions, as they experiencestirring in their bosoms. Impressed by what they see and feel, they make no distinctive between the motives which incited thecriminals to the action for which they suffer, or the heroic couragewith which they turned into good that which their judges awardedto them as evil or the purpose itself of those actions, though thatpurpose may happen to be eminently pernicious. The laws in thiscase lose their sympathy, which it ought to be their chief objectto secure, and in a participation of which consists their chiefstrength in maintaining those sanctions by which the parts of thesocial union are bound together, so as to produce, as nearly aspossible, the ends for which it is instituted. 

Secondly, --Persons of energetic character, in communities notmodelled with philosophical skill to turn all the energies whichthey contain to the purposes of common good, are prone also to fallinto the temptation of undertaking, and are peculiarly fitted fordespising the perils attendant upon consummating, the most enormouscrimes. Murder, rapes, extensive schemes of plunder are the actionsof persons belonging to this class; and death is the penalty ofconviction. But the coarseness of organization, peculiar to mencapable of committing acts wholly selfish, is usually found tobe associated with a proportionate insensibility to fear or pain. Their sufferings communicate to those of the spectators, who may beliable to the commission of similar crimes a sense of the lightnessof that event, when closely examined which, at a distance, asuneducated persons are accustomed to do, probably they regarded withhorror. But a great majority of the spectators are so bound up inthe interests and the habits of social union that no temptationwould be sufficiently strong to induce them to a commission of theenormities to which this penalty is assigned. The more powerful, andthe richer among them, --and a numerous class of little tradesmen arericher and more powerful than those who are employed by them, andthe employer, in general, bears this relation to the employed, --regardtheir own wrongs as, in some degree, avenged, and their own rightssecured by this punishment, inflicted as the penalty of whatevercrime. In cases of murder or mutilation, this feeling is almostuniversal. In those, therefore, whom this exhibition does notawaken to the sympathy which extenuates crime and discredits thelaw which restrains it, it produces feelings more directly at warwith the genuine purposes of political society. It excites thoseemotions which it is the chief object of civilization to extinguishfor ever, and in the extinction of which alone there can be anyhope of better institutions than those under which men now misgovernone another. Men feel that their revenge is gratified, and thattheir security is established by the extinction and the sufferingsof beings, in most respects resembling themselves; and their dailyoccupations constraining them to a precise form in all their thoughts, they come to connect inseparably the idea of their own advantagewith that of the death and torture of others. It is manifest thatthe object of sane polity is directly the reverse; and that lawsfounded upon reason, should accustom the gross vulgar to associatetheir ideas of security and of interest with the reformation, andthe strict restraint, for that purpose alone, of those who mightinvade it. 

The passion of revenge is originally nothing more than an habitualperception of the ideas of the sufferings of the person who inflictsan injury, as connected, as they are in a savage state, or in suchportions of society as are yet undisciplined to civilization, withsecurity that that injury will not be repeated in future. Thisfeeling, engrafted upon superstition and confirmed by habit, atlast loses sight of the only object for which it may be supposedto have been implanted, and becomes a passion and a duty to bepursued and fulfilled, even to the destruction of those ends towhich it originally tended. The other passions, both good and evil. Avarice, Remorse, Love, Patriotism, present a similar appearance;and to this principle of the mind over-shooting the mark at whichit aims, we owe all that is eminently base or excellent in humannature; in providing for the nutriment or the extinction of which, consists the true art of the legislator. [Footnote: The savage andthe illiterate are but faintly aware of the distinction betweenthe future and the past; they make actions belonging to periods sodistinct, the subjects of similar feelings; they live only in thepresent, or in the past, as it is present. It is in this that thephilosopher excels one of the many; it is this which distinguishesthe doctrine of philosophic necessity from fatalism; and thatdetermination of the will, by which it is the active source of futureevents, from that liberty or indifference, to which the abstractliability of irremediable actions is attached, according to thenotions of the vulgar. 

This is the source of the erroneous excesses of Remorse and Revenge;the one extending itself over the future, and the other over thepast; provinces in which their suggestions can only be the sourcesof evil. The purpose of a resolution to act more wisely and virtuouslyin future, and the sense of a necessity of caution in repressingan enemy, are the sources from which the enormous superstitionsimplied in the words cited have arisen. ]

Nothing is more clear than that the infliction of punishment ingeneral, in a degree which the reformation and the restraint ofthose who transgress the laws does not render indispensable, andnone more than death, confirms all the inhuman and unsocial impulsesof men. It is almost a proverbial remark, that those nations in whichthe penal code has been particularly mild, have been distinguishedfrom all others by the rarity of crime. But the example is to beadmitted to be equivocal. A more decisive argument is afforded bya consideration of the universal connexion of ferocity of manners, and a contempt of social ties, with the contempt of human life. Governments which derive their institutions from the existence ofcircumstances of barbarism and violence, with some rare exceptionsperhaps, are bloody in proportion as they are despotic, and formthe manners of their subjects to a sympathy with their own spirit. 

The spectators who feel no abhorrence at a public execution, butrather a self-applauding superiority, and a sense of gratifiedindignation, are surely excited to the most inauspicious emotions. Thefirst reflection of such a one is the sense of his own internal andactual worth, as preferable to that of the victim, whom circumstanceshave led to destruction. The meanest wretch is impressed with asense of his own comparative merit. He is one of those on whom thetower of Siloam fell not--he is such a one as Jesus Christ foundnot in all Samaria, who, in his own soul, throws the first stone atthe woman taken in adultery. The popular religion of the countrytakes its designation from that illustrious person whose beautifulsentiment I have quoted. Any one who has stript from the doctrinesof this person the veil of familiarity, will perceive how adversetheir spirit is to feelings of this nature. 

SPECULATIONS ON METAPHYSICS

I--THE MIND

It is an axiom in mental philosophy, that we can think of nothingwhich we have not perceived. When I say that we can think of nothing, I mean, we can imagine nothing, we can reason of nothing, we canremember nothing, we can foresee nothing. The most astonishingcombinations of poetry, the subtlest deductions of logic andmathematics, are no other than combinations which the intellectmakes of sensations according to its own laws. A catalogue of allthe thoughts of the mind, and of all their possible modifications, is a cyclopedic history of the universe. 

But, it will be objected, the inhabitants of the various planets ofthis and other solar systems; and the existence of a Power bearingthe same relation to all that we perceive and are, as what wecall a cause does to what we call effect, were never subjects ofsensation, and yet the laws of mind almost universally suggest, according to the various disposition of each, a conjecture, a persuasion, or a conviction of their existence. The reply issimple; these thoughts are also to be included in the catalogueof existence; they are modes in which thoughts are combined; theobjection only adds force to the conclusion, that beyond the limitsof perception and thought nothing can exist. 

Thoughts, or ideas, or notions, call them what you will, differfrom each other, not in kind, but in force. It has commonly beensupposed that those distinct thoughts which affect a number ofpersons, at regular intervals, during the passage of a multitudeof other thoughts, which are called REAL or EXTERNAL OBJECTS, are totally different in kind from those which affect only a fewpersons, and which recur at irregular intervals, and are usuallymore obscure and indistinct, such as hallucinations, dreams, and theideas of madness. No essential distinction between any one of theseideas, or any class of them, is founded on a correct observation ofthe nature of things, but merely on a consideration of what thoughtsare most invariably subservient to the security and happiness oflife; and if nothing more were expressed by the distinction, thephilosopher might safely accommodate his language to that of thevulgar. But they pretend to assert an essential difference, whichhas no foundation in truth, and which suggests a narrow and falseconception of universal nature, the parent of the most fatal errorsin speculation. A specific difference between every thought of themind, is, indeed, a necessary consequence of that law by which itperceives diversity and number; but a generic and essential differenceis wholly arbitrary. The principle of the agreement and similarityof all thoughts, is, that they are all thoughts; the principleof their disagreement consists in the variety and irregularity ofthe occasions on which they arise in the mind. That in which theyagree, to that in which they differ, is as everything to nothing. Important distinctions, of various degrees of force, indeed, are tobe established between them, if they were, as they may be, subjectsof ethical and economical discussion; but that is a questionaltogether distinct. By considering all knowledge as bounded byperception, whose operations may be indefinitely combined, we arriveat a conception of Nature inexpressibly more magnificent, simpleand true, than accords with the ordinary systems of complicated andpartial consideration. Nor does a contemplation of the universe, in this comprehensive and synthetical view, exclude the subtlestanalysis of its modifications and parts. 

A scale might be formed, graduated according to the degreesof a combined ratio of intensity, duration, connexion, periods ofrecurrence, and utility, which would be the standard, according towhich all ideas might be measured, and an uninterrupted chain ofnicely shadowed distinctions would be observed, from the faintestimpression on the senses, to the most distinct combination of thoseimpressions; from the simplest of those combinations, to that massof knowledge which, including our own nature, constitutes what wecall the universe. 

We are intuitively conscious of our own existence, and of thatconnexion in the train of our successive ideas, which we term ouridentity. We are conscious also of the existence of other minds;but not intuitively. Our evidence, with respect to the existence ofother minds, is founded upon a very complicated relation of ideas, which it is foreign to the purpose of this treatise to anatomize. The basis of this relation is, undoubtedly, a periodical recurrenceof masses of ideas, which our voluntary determinations have, inone peculiar direction, no power to circumscribe or to arrest, andagainst the recurrence of which they can only imperfectly provide. The irresistible laws of thought constrain us to believe that theprecise limits of our actual ideas are not the actual limits ofpossible ideas; the law, according to which these deductions aredrawn, is called analogy; and this is the foundation of all ourinferences, from one idea to another, inasmuch as they resembleeach other. 

We see trees, houses, fields, living beings in our own shape, andin shapes more or less analogous to our own. These are perpetuallychanging the mode of their existence relatively to us. To expressthe varieties of these modes, we say, WE MOVE, THEY MOVE; and as thismotion is continual, though not uniform, we express our conceptionof the diversities of its course by--IT HAS BEEN, IT IS, IT SHALLBE. These diversities are events or objects, and are essential, considered relatively to human identity, for the existence of thehuman mind. For if the inequalities, produced by what has beentermed the operations of the external universe, were levelled by theperception of our being, uniting and filling up their interstices, motion and mensuration, and time, and space; the elements of thehuman mind being thus abstracted, sensation and imagination cease. Mind cannot be considered pure. 

II--WHAT METAPHYSICS ARE. ERRORS IN THE USUAL METHODS OF CONSIDERINGTHEM

We do not attend sufficiently to what passes within ourselves. Wecombine words, combined a thousand times before. In our minds weassume entire opinions; and in the expression of those opinions, entire phrases, when we would philosophize. Our whole style ofexpression and sentiment is infected with the tritest plagiarisms. Our words are dead, our thoughts are cold and borrowed. 

Let us contemplate facts; let us, in the great study of ourselves, resolutely compel the mind to a rigid consideration of itself. Weare not content with conjecture, and inductions, and syllogisms, in sciences regarding external objects. As in these, let us also, in considering the phenomena of mind, severely collect thosefacts which cannot be disputed. Metaphysics will thus possess thisconspicuous advantage over every other science, that each student, by attentively referring to his own mind, may ascertain theauthorities upon which any assertions regarding it are supported. There can thus be no deception, we ourselves being the depositariesof the evidence of the subject which we consider. 

Metaphysics may be defined as an inquiry concerning those thingsbelonging to, or connected with, the internal nature of man. 

It is said that mind produces motion; and it might as well havebeen said, that motion produces mind. 

III--DIFFICULTY OF ANALYSING THE HUMAN MIND

If it were possible that a person should give a faithful history ofhis being, from the earliest epochs of his recollection, a picturewould be presented such as the world has never contemplated before. A mirror would be held up to all men in which they might beholdtheir own recollections, and, in dim perspective, their shadowy hopesand fears, --all that they dare not, or that, daring and desiring, they could not expose to the open eyes of day. But thought canwith difficulty visit the intricate and winding chambers which itinhabits. It is like a river whose rapid and perpetual stream flowsoutwards;--like one in dread who speeds through the recesses ofsome haunted pile, and dares not look behind. The caverns of themind are obscure, and shadowy; or pervaded with a lustre, beautifullybright indeed, but shining not beyond their portals. If it werepossible to be where we have been, vitally and indeed--if, at themoment of our presence there, we could define the results of ourexperience, --if the passage from sensation to reflection--from astate of passive perception to voluntary contemplation, were notso dizzying and so tumultuous, this attempt would be less difficult. 

IV--HOW THE ANALYSIS SHOULD BE CARRIED ON

Most of the errors of philosophers have arisen from consideringthe human being in a point of view too detailed and circumscribedHe is not a moral, and an intellectual, --but also, and pre-eminently, an imaginative being. His own mind is his law; his own mind is allthings to him. If we would arrive at any knowledge which should beserviceable from the practical conclusions to which it leads, weought to consider the mind of man and the universe as the greatwhole on which to exercise our speculations. Here, above all, verbal disputes ought to be laid aside, though this has long beentheir chosen field of battle. It imports little to inquire whetherthought be distinct from the objects of thought. The use of thewords EXTERNAL and INTERNAL, as applied to the establishment of thisdistinction, has been the symbol and the source of much dispute. This is merely an affair of words, and as the dispute deserves, tosay, that when speaking of the objects of thought, we indeed onlydescribe one of the forms of thought--or that, speaking of thought, we only apprehend one of the operations of the universal system ofbeings. 

V--CATALOGUE OF THE PHENOMENA OF DREAMS, AS CONNECTING SLEEPINGAND WAKING

1. Let us reflect on our infancy, and give as faithfully as possiblea relation of the events of sleep. 

And first I am bound to present a faithful picture of my own peculiarnature relatively to sleep. I do not doubt that were every individualto imitate me, it would be found that among many circumstancespeculiar to their individual nature, a sufficiently generalresemblance would be found to prove the connexion existing betweenthose peculiarities and the most universal phenomena. I shall employcaution, indeed, as to the facts which I state, that they containnothing false or exaggerated. But they contain no more than certainelucidations of my own nature; concerning the degree in whichit resembles, or differs from, that of others, I am by no meansaccurately aware. It is sufficient, however, to caution the readeragainst drawing general inferences from particular instances. 

I omit the general instances of delusion in fever or delirium, aswell as mere dreams considered in themselves. A delineation of thissubject, however inexhaustible and interesting, is to be passedover. What is the connexion of sleeping and of waking?

2. I distinctly remember dreaming three several times, betweenintervals of two or more years, the same precise dream. It wasnot so much what is ordinarily called a dream; the single image, unconnected with all other images, of a youth who was educated atthe same school with myself, presented itself in sleep. Even now, after the lapse of many years, I can never hear the name of thisyouth, without the three places where I dreamed of him presentingthemselves distinctly to my mind. 

3. In dreams, images acquire associations peculiar to dreaming; sothat the idea of a particular house, when it recurs a second timein dreams, will have relation with the idea of the same house, inthe first time, of a nature entirely different from that which thehouse excites, when seen or thought of in relation to waking ideas. 

4. I have beheld scenes, with the intimate and unaccountableconnexion of which with the obscure parts of my own nature, Ihave been irresistibly impressed. I have beheld a scene which hasproduced no unusual effect on my thoughts. After the lapse of manyyears I have dreamed of this scene. It has hung on my memory, ithas haunted my thoughts, at intervals, with the pertinacity of anobject connected with human affections. I have visited this sceneagain. Neither the dream could be dissociated from the landscape, nor the landscape from the dream, nor feelings, such as neithersingly could have awakened, from both. 

But the most remarkable event of this nature, which ever occurredto me, happened five years ago at Oxford. I was walking witha friend, in the neighbourhood of that city, engaged in earnestand interesting conversation. We suddenly turned the corner of alane, and the view, which its high banks and hedges had concealed, presented itself. The view consisted of a wind-mill, standingin one among many plashy meadows, inclosed with stone walls; theirregular and broken ground, between the wall and the road on whichwe stood; a long low hill behind the windmill, and a grey coveringof uniform cloud spread over the evening sky. It was that seasonwhen the last leaf had just fallen from the scant and stunted ash. The scene surely was a common scene; the season and the hour littlecalculated to kindle lawless thought; it was a tame uninterestingassemblage of objects, such as would drive the imagination forrefuge in serious and sober talk, to the evening fireside, and thedessert of winter fruits and wine. The effect which it produced onme was not such as could have been expected. I suddenly rememberedto have seen that exact scene in some dream of long--. [Footnote:Here I was obliged to leave off, overcome by thrilling horror. ]

[1815; publ. 1840]

SPECULATIONS ON MORALS

I--PLAN OF A TREATISE ON MORALS

That great science which regards nature and the operations ofthe human mind, is popularly divided into Morals and Metaphysics. The latter relates to a just classification, and the assignmentof distinct names to its ideas; the former regards simply thedetermination of that arrangement of them which produces the greatestand most solid happiness. It is admitted that a virtuous or moralaction, is that action which, when considered in all its accessoriesand consequences, is fitted to produce the highest pleasure to thegreatest number of sensitive beings. The laws according to whichall pleasure, since it cannot be equally felt by all sensitivebeings, ought to be distributed by a voluntary agent, are reservedfor a separate chapter. 

The design of this little treatise is restricted to the developmentof the elementary principles of morals. As far as regards thatpurpose, metaphysical science will be treated merely so far as asource of negative truth; whilst morality will be considered as ascience, respecting which we can arrive at positive conclusions. 

The misguided imaginations of men have rendered the ascertaining ofwhat IS NOT TRUE, the principal direct service which metaphysicalscience can bestow upon moral science. Moral science itself is thedoctrine of the voluntary actions of man, as a sentient and socialbeing. These actions depend on the thoughts in his mind. But thereis a mass of popular opinion, from which the most enlightened personsare seldom wholly free, into the truth or falsehood of which itis incumbent on us to inquire, before we can arrive at any firmconclusions as to the conduct which we ought to pursue in theregulation of our own minds, or towards our fellow beings; or beforewe can ascertain the elementary laws, according to which thesethoughts, from which these actions flow, are originally combined. 

The object of the forms according to which human society is administered, is the happiness of the individuals composing the communities whichthey regard, and these forms are perfect or imperfect in proportionto the degree in which they promote this end. 

This object is not merely the quantity of happiness enjoyed byindividuals as sensitive beings, but the mode in which it shouldbe distributed among them as social beings. It is not enough, ifsuch a coincidence can be conceived as possible, that one personor class of persons should enjoy the highest happiness, whilstanother is suffering a disproportionate degree of misery. It isnecessary that the happiness produced by the common efforts, andpreserved by the common care, should be distributed according tothe just claims of each individual; if not, although the quantityproduced should be the same, the end of society would remainunfulfilled. The object is in a compound proportion to the quantityof happiness produced, and the correspondence of the mode in whichit is distributed, to the elementary feelings of man as a socialbeing. 

The disposition in an individual to promote this object is calledvirtue; and the two constituent parts of virtue, benevolence andjustice, are correlative with these two great portions of the onlytrue object of all voluntary actions of a human being. Benevolenceis the desire to be the author of good, and justice the apprehensionof the manner in which good ought to be done. 

Justice and benevolence result from the elementary laws of thehuman mind. 

CHAPTER I ON THE NATURE OF VIRTUE

SECT. 1. General View of the Nature and Objects of Virtue. --2. TheOrigin and Basis of Virtue, as founded on the Elementary Principlesof Mind. --3. The Laws which flow from the nature of Mind regulatingthe application of those principles to human actions;--4. Virtue, a possible attribute of man. 

We exist in the midst of a multitude of beings like ourselves, uponwhose happiness most of our actions exert some obvious and decisiveinfluence. 

The regulation of this influence is the object of moral science. We know that we are susceptible of receiving painful or pleasurableimpressions of greater or less intensity and duration. That is calledgood which produces pleasure; that is called evil which producespain. These are general names, applicable to every class of causes, from which an overbalance of pain or pleasure may result. But whena human being is the active instrument of generating or diffusinghappiness, the principle through which it is most effectuallyinstrumental to that purpose, is called virtue. And benevolence, or the desire to be the author of good, united with justice, oran apprehension of the manner in which that good is to be done, constitutes virtue. 

But wherefore should a man be benevolent and just? The immediateemotions of his nature, especially in its most inartificial state, prompt him to inflict pain, and to arrogate dominion. He desiresto heap superfluities to his own store, although others perish withfamine. He is propelled to guard against the smallest invasion ofhis own liberty, though he reduces others to a condition of the mostpitiless servitude. He is revengeful, proud and selfish. Whereforeshould he curb these propensities?

It is inquired, for what reason a human being should engagein procuring the happiness, or refrain from producing the pain ofanother? When a reason is required to prove the necessity of adoptingany system of conduct, what is it that the objector demands? Herequires proof of that system of conduct being such as will mosteffectually promote the happiness of mankind. To demonstrate this, is to render a moral reason. Such is the object of virtue. 

A common sophism, which, like many others, depends on the abuse ofa metaphorical expression to a literal purpose, has produced muchof the confusion which has involved the theory of morals. It is saidthat no person is bound to be just or kind, if, on his neglect, heshould fail to incur some penalty. Duty is obligation. There canbe no obligation without an obliger. Virtue is a law, to which itis the will of the lawgiver that we should conform; which will weshould in no manner be bound to obey, unless some dreadful punishmentwere attached to disobedience. This is the philosophy of slaveryand superstition. 

In fact, no person can be BOUND or OBLIGED, without some powerpreceding to bind and oblige. If I observe a man bound hand andfoot, I know that some one bound him. But if I observe him returningself-satisfied from the performance of some action, by which he hasbeen the willing author of extensive benefit, I do not infer thatthe anticipation of hellish agonies, or the hope of heavenly reward, has constrained him to such an act. 

 . . . . . . . 

It remains to be stated in what manner the sensations whichconstitute the basis of virtue originate in the human mind; whatare the laws which it receives there; how far the principles ofmind allow it to be an attribute of a human being; and, lastly, what is the probability of persuading mankind to adopt it as auniversal and systematic motive of conduct. 

BENEVOLENCE

There is a class of emotions which we instinctively avoid. A humanbeing, such as is man considered in his origin, a child a monthold, has a very imperfect consciousness of the existence of othernatures resembling itself. All the energies of its being aredirected to the extinction of the pains with which it is perpetuallyassailed. At length it discovers that it is surrounded by naturessusceptible of sensations similar to its own. It is very late beforechildren attain to this knowledge. If a child observes, withoutemotion, its nurse or its mother suffering acute pain, it isattributable rather to ignorance than insensibility. So soon asthe accents and gestures, significant of pain, are referred to thefeelings which they express, they awaken in the mind of the beholdera desire that they should cease. Pain is thus apprehended to be evilfor its own sake, without any other necessary reference to the mindby which its existence is perceived, than such as is indispensableto its perception. The tendencies of our original sensations, indeed, all have for their object the preservation of our individual being. But these are passive and unconscious. In proportion as the mindacquires an active power, the empire of these tendencies becomeslimited. Thus an infant, a savage, and a solitary beast, is selfish, because its mind is incapable of receiving an accurate intimationof the nature of pain as existing in beings resembling itself. The inhabitant of a highly civilized community will more acutelysympathize with the sufferings and enjoyments of others, thanthe inhabitant of a society of a less degree of civilization. Hewho shall have cultivated his intellectual powers by familiaritywith the highest specimens of poetry and philosophy, will usuallysympathize more than one engaged in the less refined functionsof manual labour. Every one has experience of the fact, that tosympathize with the sufferings of another, is to enjoy a transitoryoblivion of his own. 

The mind thus acquires, by exercise, a habit, as it were, ofperceiving and abhorring evil, however remote from the immediatesphere of sensations with which that individual mind is conversant. Imagination or mind employed in prophetically imaging forth itsobjects, is that faculty of human nature on which every gradationof its progress, nay, every, the minutest, change, depends. Painor pleasure, if subtly analysed, will be found to consist entirelyin prospect. The only distinction between the selfish man and thevirtuous man is, that the imagination of the former is confined withina narrow limit, whilst that of the latter embraces a comprehensivecircumference. In this sense, wisdom and virtue may be said to beinseparable, and criteria of each other. Selfishness is the offspringof ignorance and mistake; it is the portion of unreflecting infancy, and savage solitude, or of those whom toil or evil occupationshave blunted or rendered torpid; disinterested benevolence is theproduct of a cultivated imagination, and has an intimate connexionwith all the arts which add ornament, or dignity, or power, or stability to the social state of man. Virtue is thus entirelya refinement of civilized life; a creation of the human mind; or, rather, a combination which it has made, according to elementaryrules contained within itself, of the feelings suggested by therelations established between man and man. 

All the theories which have refined and exalted humanity, or thosewhich have been devised as alleviations of its mistakes and evils, have been based upon the elementary emotions of disinterestedness, which we feel to constitute the majesty of our nature. Patriotism, as it existed in the ancient republics, was never, as has beensupposed, a calculation of personal advantages. When Mutius Scaevolathrust his hand into the burning coals, and Regulus returnedto Carthage, and Epicharis sustained the rack silently, in thetorments of which she knew that she would speedily perish, ratherthan betray the conspirators to the tyrant [Footnote: Tacitus. ];these illustrious persons certainly made a small estimate of theirprivate interest. If it be said that they sought posthumous fame;instances are not wanting in history which prove that men have evendefied infamy for the sake of good. But there is a great error inthe world with respect to the selfishness of fame. It is certainlypossible that a person should seek distinction as a medium ofpersonal gratification. But the love of fame is frequently no morethan a desire that the feelings of others should confirm, illustrate, and sympathize with, our own. In this respect it is allied with allthat draws us out of ourselves. It is the 'last infirmity of nobleminds'. Chivalry was likewise founded on the theory of self-sacrifice. Love possesses so extraordinary a power over the human heart, onlybecause disinterestedness is united with the natural propensities. These propensities themselves are comparatively impotent in caseswhere the imagination of pleasure to be given, as well as to bereceived, does not enter into the account. Let it not be objectedthat patriotism, and chivalry, and sentimental love, have been thefountains of enormous mischief. They are cited only to establish theproposition that, according to the elementary principles of mind, man is capable of desiring and pursuing good for its own sake. 

JUSTICE

The benevolent propensities are thus inherent in the human mind. We are impelled to seek the happiness of others. We experiencea satisfaction in being the authors of that happiness. Everythingthat lives is open to impressions or pleasure and pain. We areled by our benevolent propensities to regard every human beingindifferently with whom we come in contact. They have preferenceonly with respect to those who offer themselves most obviouslyto our notice. Human beings are indiscriminating and blind; theywill avoid inflicting pain, though that pain should be attendedwith eventual benefit; they will seek to confer pleasure withoutcalculating the mischief that may result. They benefit one at theexpense of many. 

There is a sentiment in the human mind that regulates benevolencein its application as a principle of action. This is the sense ofjustice. Justice, as well as benevolence, is an elementary law ofhuman nature. It is through this principle that men are impelledto distribute any means of pleasure which benevolence may suggestthe communication of to others, in equal portions among an equalnumber of applicants. If ten men are shipwrecked on a desert island, they distribute whatever subsistence may remain to them, into equalportions among themselves. If six of them conspire to deprive theremaining four of their share, their conduct is termed unjust. 

The existence of pain has been shown to be a circumstance which thehuman mind regards with dissatisfaction, and of which it desiresthe cessation. It is equally according to its nature to desire thatthe advantages to be enjoyed by a limited number of persons shouldbe enjoyed equally by all. This proposition is supported by theevidence of indisputable facts. Tell some ungarbled tale of a numberof persons being made the victims of the enjoyments of one, and hewho would appeal in favour of any system which might produce suchan evil to the primary emotions of our nature, would have nothingto reply. Let two persons, equally strangers, make application forsome benefit in the possession of a third to bestow, and to whichhe feels that they have an equal claim. They are both sensitivebeings; pleasure and pain affect them alike. 

CHAPTER II

It is foreign to the general scope of this little treatise to encumbera simple argument by controverting any of the trite objections ofhabit or fanaticism. But there are two; the first, the basis of allpolitical mistake, and the second, the prolific cause and effectof religious error, which it seems useful to refute. 

First, it is inquired, 'Wherefore should a man be benevolent andjust?' The answer has been given in the preceding chapter. 

If a man persists to inquire why he ought to promote the happinessof mankind, he demands a mathematical or metaphysical reason fora moral action. The absurdity of this scepticism is more apparent, but not less real than the exacting a moral reason for a mathematicalor metaphysical fact. If any person should refuse to admit that allthe radii of a circle are of equal length, or that human actionsare necessarily determined by motives, until it could be proved thatthese radii and these actions uniformly tended to the production ofthe greatest general good, who would not wonder at the unreasonableand capricious association of his ideas?

The writer of a philosophical treatise may, I imagine, at thisadvanced era of human intellect, be held excused from entering intoa controversy with those reasoners, if such there are, who wouldclaim an exemption from its decrees in favour of any one among thosediversified systems of obscure opinion respecting morals, which, under the name of religions, have in various ages and countriesprevailed among mankind. Besides that if, as these reasoners havepretended, eternal torture or happiness will ensue as the consequenceof certain actions, we should be no nearer the possession of astandard to determine what actions were right and wrong, even if thispretended revelation, which is by no means the case, had furnishedus with a complete catalogue of them. The character of actions asvirtuous or vicious would by no means be determined alone by thepersonal advantage or disadvantage of each moral agent individuallyconsidered. Indeed, an action is often virtuous in proportion tothe greatness of the personal calamity which the author willinglydraws upon himself by daring to perform it. It is because anaction produces an overbalance of pleasure or pain to the greatestnumber of sentient beings, and not merely because its consequencesare beneficial or injurious to the author of that action, that itis good or evil. Nay, this latter consideration has a tendency topollute the purity of virtue, inasmuch as it consists in the motiverather than in the consequences of an action. A person who shouldlabour for the happiness of mankind lest he should be tormentedeternally in Hell, would, with reference to that motive, possess aslittle claim to the epithet of virtuous, as he who should torture, imprison, and burn them alive, a more usual and natural consequenceof such principles, for the sake of the enjoyments of Heaven. 

My neighbour, presuming on his strength, may direct me to performor to refrain from a particular action; indicating a certain arbitrarypenalty in the event of disobedience within power to inflict. My action, if modified by his menaces, can no degree participatein virtue. He has afforded me no criterion as to what is right orwrong. A king, or an assembly of men, may publish a proclamationaffixing any penalty to any particular action, but that is notimmoral because such penalty is affixed. Nothing is more evidentthan that the epithet of virtue is inapplicable to the refrainingfrom that action on account of the evil arbitrarily attached to it. If the action is in itself beneficial, virtue would rather consistin not refraining from it, but in firmly defying the personalconsequences attached to its performance. 

Some usurper of supernatural energy might subdue the whole globeto his power; he might possess new and unheard-of resources forenduing his punishments with the most terrible attributes or pain. The torments of his victims might be intense in their degree, and protracted to an infinite duration. Still the 'will of thelawgiver' would afford no surer criterion as to what actions wereright or wrong. It would only increase the possible virtue of thosewho refuse to become the instruments of his tyranny. 

II--MORAL SCIENCE CONSISTS IN CONSIDERING THE DIFFERENCE, NOT THERESEMBLANCE, OF PERSONS

The internal influence, derived from the constitution of the mindfrom which they flow, produces that peculiar modification of actions, which makes them intrinsically good or evil. 

To attain an apprehension of the importance of this distinction, let us visit, in imagination, the proceedings of some metropolis. Consider the multitude of human beings who inhabit it, and survey, in thought, the actions of the several classes into which they aredivided. Their obvious actions are apparently uniform: the stabilityof human society seems to be maintained sufficiently by the uniformityof the conduct of its members, both with regard to themselves, and with regard to others. The labourer arises at a certain hour, and applies himself to the task enjoined him. The functionariesof government and law are regularly employed in their offices andcourts. The trader holds a train of conduct from which he neverdeviates. The ministers of religion employ an accustomed language, and maintain a decent and equable regard. The army is drawn forth, the motions of every soldier are such as they were expected to be;the general commands, and his words are echoed from troop to troop. The domestic actions of men are, for the most part, undistinguishableone from the other, at a superficial glance. The actions whichare classed under the general appellation of marriage, education, friendship, &c. , are perpetually going on, and to a superficialglance, are similar one to the other. 

But, if we would see the truth of things, they must be stripped ofthis fallacious appearance of uniformity. In truth, no one actionhas, when considered in its whole extent, any essential resemblancewith any other. Each individual, who composes the vast multitudewhich we have been contemplating, has a peculiar frame of mind, which, whilst the features of the great mass of his actions remainuniform, impresses the minuter lineaments with its peculiar hues. Thus, whilst his life, as a whole, is like the lives of other men, in detail, it is most unlike; and the more subdivided the actionsbecome; that is, the more they enter into that class which havea vital influence on the happiness of others and his own, so muchthe more are they distinct from those of other men. 

 Those little, nameless, unremembered acts Of kindness and of love, as well as those deadly outrages which are inflicted by a look, a word--or less--the very refraining from some faint and mostevanescent expression of countenance; these flow from a profoundersource than the series of our habitual conduct, which, it hasbeen already said, derives its origin from without. These are theactions, and such as these, which make human life what it is, andare the fountains of all the good and evil with which its entiresurface is so widely and impartially overspread; and though they arecalled minute, they are called so in compliance with the blindnessof those who cannot estimate their importance. It is in the dueappreciating the general effects of their peculiarities, and incultivating the habit of acquiring decisive knowledge respectingthe tendencies arising out of them in particular cases, that themost important part of moral science consists. The deepest abyssof these vast and multitudinous caverns, it is necessary that weshould visit. 

This is the difference between social and individual man. Not thatthis distinction is to be considered definite, or characteristicof one human being as compared with another; it denotes rather twoclasses of agency, common in a degree to every human being. Noneis exempt, indeed, from that species of influence which affects, asit were, the surface of his being, and gives the specific outlineto his conduct. Almost all that is ostensible submits to thatlegislature created by the general representation of the pastfeelings of mankind--imperfect as it is from a variety of causes, as it exists in the government, the religion, and domestic habits. Those who do not nominally, yet actually, submit to the same power. The external features of their conduct, indeed, can no more escapeit, than the clouds can escape from the stream of the wind; andhis opinion, which he often hopes he has dispassionately securedfrom all contagion of prejudice and vulgarity, would be found, onexamination, to be the inevitable excrescence of the very usagesfrom which he vehemently dissents. Internally all is conductedotherwise; the efficiency, the essence, the vitality of actions, derives its colour from what is no ways contributed to from anyexternal source. Like the plant which while it derives the accidentof its size and shape from the soil in which it springs, and iscankered, or distorted, or inflated, yet retains those qualitieswhich essentially divide it from all others; so that hemlockcontinues to be poison, and the violet does not cease to emit itsodour in whatever soil it may grow. 

We consider our own nature too superficially. We look on all thatin ourselves with which we can discover a resemblance in others;and consider those resemblances as the materials of moral knowledge. It is in the differences that it actually consists. 

[1815; publ. 1840]

ESSAY ON THE LITERATURE, THE ARTS, AND THE MANNERS OF THE ATHENIANS

A FRAGMENT

The period which intervened between the birth of Pericles and thedeath of Aristotle, is undoubtedly, whether considered in itself, or with reference to the effects which it has produced uponthe subsequent destinies of civilized man, the most memorable inthe history of the world. What was the combination of moral andpolitical circumstances which produced so unparalleled a progressduring that period in literature and the arts;--why that progress, so rapid and so sustained, so soon received a check, and becameretrograde, --are problems left to the wonder and conjecture ofposterity. The wrecks and fragments of those subtle and profoundminds, like the ruins of a fine statue, obscurely suggest to us thegrandeur and perfection of the whole. Their very language--a typeof the understandings of which it was the creation and the image--invariety, in simplicity, in flexibility, and in copiousness, excelsevery other language of the western world. Their sculptures aresuch as we, in our presumption, assume to be the models of idealtruth and beauty, and to which no artist of modern times canproduce forms in any degree comparable. Their paintings, accordingto Pliny and Pausanias, were full of delicacy and harmony; and someeven were powerfully pathetic, so as to awaken, like tender musicor tragic poetry, the most overwhelming emotions. We are accustomedto conceive the painters of the sixteenth century, as those whohave brought their art to the highest perfection, probably becausenone of the ancient paintings have been preserved. For all theinventive arts maintain, as it were, a sympathetic connexion betweeneach other, being no more than various expressions of one internalpower, modified by different circumstances, either of an individual, or of society; and the paintings of that period would probably bearthe same relation as is confessedly borne by the sculptures to allsucceeding ones. Of their music we know little; but the effectswhich it is said to have produced, whether they be attributed tothe skill of the composer, or the sensibility of his audience, arefar more powerful than any which we experience from the music ofour own times; and if, indeed, the melody of their compositionswere more tender and delicate, and inspiring, than the melodies ofsome modern European nations, their superiority in this art musthave been something wonderful, and wholly beyond conception. 

Their poetry seems to maintain a very high, though not sodisproportionate a rank, in the comparison. Perhaps Shakespeare, fromthe variety and comprehension of his genius, is to be considered, on the whole, as the greatest individual mind, of which we havespecimens remaining. Perhaps Dante created imaginations of greaterloveliness and energy than any that are to be found in the ancientliterature of Greece. Perhaps nothing has been discovered in thefragments of the Greek lyric poets equivalent to the sublime andchivalric sensibility of Petrarch. --But, as a poet. Homer must beacknowledged to excel Shakespeare in the truth, the harmony, thesustained grandeur, the satisfying completeness of his images, theirexact fitness to the illustration, and to that to which they belong. Nor could Dante, deficient in conduct, plan, nature, variety, andtemperance, have been brought into comparison with these men, butfor those fortunate isles laden with golden fruit, which alonecould tempt any one to embark in the misty ocean of his dark andextravagant fiction. 

But, omitting the comparison of individual minds, which can affordno general inference, how superior was the spirit and system oftheir poetry to that of any other period! So that had any othergenius equal in other respects to the greatest that ever enlightenedthe world, arisen in that age, he would have been superior to all, from this circumstance alone--that had conceptions would have assumeda more harmonious and perfect form. For it is worthy of observation, that whatever the poet of that age produced is as harmonious andperfect as possible. In a drama, for instance, were the compositionof a person of inferior talent, it was still homogeneous and freefrom inequalities it was a whole, consistent with itself. Thecompositions of great minds bore throughout the sustained stamp oftheir greatness. In the poetry of succeeding ages the expectationsare often exalted on Icarian wings, and fall, too much disappointedto give a memory and a name to the oblivious pool in which theyfell. 

In physical knowledge Aristotle and Theophrastus had already--nodoubt assisted by the labours of those of their predecessor whomthey criticize--made advances worthy of the maturity of science. The astonishing invention of geometry, that series of discoverieswhich have enabled man to command the element and foresee futureevents, before the subjects of his ignorant wonder, and which haveopened as it were the doors of the mysteries of nature, had alreadybeen brought to great perfection. Metaphysics, the science of man'sintimate nature, and logic, or the grammar and elementary principlesof that science received from the latter philosophers of the Pericleanage a firm basis. All our more exact philosophy is built upon thelabours of these great men, and many of the words which we employin metaphysical distinctions were invented by them to give accuracyand system to their reasonings. The science of morals, or thevoluntary conduct of men in relation to themselves or others, datesfrom this epoch. How inexpressibly bolder and more pure were thedoctrines of those great men, in comparison with the timid maximswhich prevail in the writings of the most esteemed modern moralists!They were such as Phocion, and Epaminondas, and Timoleon, who formedthemselves on their influence, were to the wretched heroes of ourown age. 

Their political and religious institutions are more difficult tobring into comparison with those of other times. A summary ideamay be formed of the worth of any political and religious system, by observing the comparative degree of happiness and of intellectproduced under its influence. And whilst many institution andopinions, which in ancient Greece were obstacles to the improvementof the human race, have been abolished among modern nations, howmany pernicious superstitions and new contrivances of misrule, andunheard-of complications of public mischief, have not been inventedamong them by the ever-watchful spirit of avarice and tyranny!

The modern nations of the civilized world owe the progress whichthey have made--as well in those physical sciences in which theyhave already excelled their masters, as in the moral and intellectualinquiries, in which, with all the advantage of the experience ofthe latter, it can scarcely be said that they have yet equalledthem, --to what is called the revival of learning; that is, the studyof the writers of the age which preceded and immediately followedthe government of Pericles, or of subsequent writers, who were, so to speak, the rivers flowing from those immortal fountains. And though there seems to be a principle in the modern world, which, should circumstances analogous to those which modelledthe intellectual resources of the age to which we refer, into soharmonious a proportion, again arise, would arrest and perpetuatethem, and consign their results to a more equal, extensive, andlasting improvement of the condition of man--though justice andthe true meaning of human society are, if not more accurately, moregenerally understood; though perhaps men know more, and thereforeare more, as a mass, yet this principle has never been called intoaction, and requires indeed a universal and an almost appalling changein the system of existing things. The study of modern history isthe study of kings, financiers, statesmen, and priests. The historyof ancient Greece is the study of legislators, philosophers, and poets; it is the history of men, compared with the history oftitles. What the Greeks were, was a reality, not a promise. And whatwe are and hope to be, is derived, as it were, from the influenceand inspiration of these glorious generations. 

Whatever tends to afford a further illustration of the manners andopinions of those to whom we owe so much, and who were perhaps, onthe whole, the most perfect specimens of humanity of whom we haveauthentic record, were infinitely valuable. Let us see their errors, their weaknesses, their daily actions, their familiar conversation, and catch the tone of their society. When we discover how far themost admirable community ever framed was removed from that perfectionto which human society is impelled by some active power within eachbosom to aspire, how great ought to be our hopes, how resolute ourstruggles! For the Greeks of the Periclean age were widely differentfrom us. It is to be lamented that no modern writer has hithertodared to show them precisely as they were. Barthelemi cannotbe denied the praise of industry and system; but he never forgetsthat he is a Christian and a Frenchman. Wieland, in his delightfulnovels, makes indeed a very tolerable Pagan, but cherishes too manypolitical prejudices, and refrains from diminishing the interest ofhis romances by painting sentiments in which no European of moderntimes can possibly sympathize. There is no book which shows theGreeks precisely as they were; they seem all written for childrenwith the caution that no practice or sentiment, highly inconsistentwith our present manners, should be mentioned, lest those mannersshould receive outrage and violation. But there are many to whomthe Greek language is inaccessible, who ought not to be excluded bythis prudery from possessing an exact and comprehensive conceptionof the history of man; for there is no knowledge concerning what manhas been and may be, from partaking of which a person can depart, without becoming in some degree more philosophical, tolerant, andjust. 

One of the chief distinctions between the manners of ancient Greeceand modern Europe, consisted in the regulations and the sentimentsrespecting sexual intercourse. Whether this difference arises fromsome imperfect influence of the doctrines of Jesus, who allegesthe absolute and unconditional equality of all human beings, orfrom the institutions of chivalry, or from a certain fundamentaldifference of physical nature existing in the Celts, or from acombination of all or any of these causes acting on each other, isa question worthy of voluminous investigation. The fact is, thatthe modern Europeans have in this circumstance, and in the abolitionof slavery, made an improvement the most decisive in the regulationof human society; and all the virtue and the wisdom of the Pericleanage arose under other institutions, in spite of the diminutionwhich personal slavery and the inferiority of women, recognized bylaw and opinion, must have produced in the delicacy, the strength, the comprehensiveness, and the accuracy of their conceptions, inmoral, political, and metaphysical science, and perhaps in everyother art and science. 

The women, thus degraded, became such as it was expected theywould become. They possessed, except with extraordinary exceptions, the habits and the qualities of slaves. They were probably notextremely beautiful; at least there was no such disproportion inthe attractions of the external form between the female and malesex among the Greeks, as exists among the modern Europeans. Theywere certainly devoid of that moral and intellectual lovelinesswith which the acquisition of knowledge and the cultivation ofsentiment animates, as with another life of overpowering grace, the lineaments and the gestures of every form which they inhabit. Their eyes could not have been deep and intricate from the workingsof the mind, and could have entangled no heart in soul-enwovenlabyrinths. 

Let it not be imagined that because the Greeks were deprived ofits legitimate object, they were incapable of sentimental love; andthat this passion is the mere child of chivalry and the literature ofmodern times. This object or its archetype for ever exists in themind, which selects among those who resemble it that which mostresembles it; and instinctively fills up the interstices of theimperfect image, in the same manner as the imagination moulds andcompletes the shapes in clouds, or in the fire, into the resemblancesof whatever form, animal, building, &c. , happens to be present toit. Man is in his wildest state a social being: a certain degreeof civilization and refinement ever produces the want of sympathiesstill more intimate and complete; and the gratification of thesenses is no longer all that is sought in sexual connexion. Itsoon becomes a very small part of that profound and complicatedsentiment, which we call love, which is rather the universal thirstfor a communion not only of the senses, but of our whole nature, intellectual, imaginative and sensitive, and which, when individualized, becomes an imperious necessity, only to be satisfied by the completeor partial, actual or supposed fulfilment of its claims. This wantgrows more powerful in proportion to the development which ournature receives from civilization, for man never ceases to be asocial being. The sexual impulse, which is only one, and often asmall part of those claims, serves, from its obvious and externalnature, as a kind of type or expression of the rest, a common basis, an acknowledged and visible link. Still it is a claim which evenderives a strength not its own from the accessory circumstanceswhich surround it, and one which our nature thirsts to satisfy. Toestimate this, observe the degree of intensity and durability ofthe love of the male towards the female in animals and savages andacknowledge all the duration and intensity observable in the loveof civilized beings beyond that of savages to be produced fromother causes. In the susceptibility of the external senses thereis probably no important difference. 

Among the ancient Greeks the male sex, one half of the human race, received the highest cultivation and refinement: whilst the other, so far as intellect is concerned, were educated as slaves and wereraised but few degrees in all that related to moral of intellectualexcellence above the condition of savages. The gradations in thesociety of man present us with slow improvement in this respect. The Roman women held a higher consideration in society, and wereesteemed almost as the equal partners with their husbands in theregulation of domestic economy and the education of their children. The practices and customs of modern Europe are essentially differentfrom and incomparably less pernicious than either, however remotefrom what an enlightened mind cannot fail to desire as the futuredestiny of human beings. 

[1818; publ. 1840]

ON THE SYMPOSIUM, OR PREFACE TO THE BANQUET OF PLATO

A FRAGMENT

The dialogue entitled The Banquet was selected by the translatoras the most beautiful and perfect among all the works of Plato. [Footnote: The Republic, though replete with considerable errorsof speculation, is, indeed, the greatest repository of importanttruths of all the works of Plato. This, perhaps, is because it isthe longest. He first, and perhaps last, maintained that a stateought to be governed, not by the wealthiest, or the most ambitious, or the most cunning, but by the wisest; the method of selectingsuch rulers, and the laws by which such a selection is made, mustcorrespond with and arise out of the moral freedom and refinementof the people. ] He despairs of having communicated to the Englishlanguage any portion of the surpassing graces of the composition, or having done more than present an imperfect shadow of the languageand the sentiment of this astonishing production. 

Plato is eminently the greatest among the Greek philosophers, andfrom, or, rather, perhaps through him, his master Socrates, haveproceeded those emanations of moral and metaphysical knowledge, on which a long series and an incalculable variety of popularsuperstitions have sheltered their absurdities from the slow contemptof mankind. Plato exhibits the rare union of close and subtle logicwith the Pythian enthusiasm of poetry, melted by the splendourand harmony of his periods into one irresistible stream of musicalimpressions, which hurry the persuasions onward, as in a breathlesscareer. His language is that of an immortal spirit, rather thana man. Lord Bacon is, perhaps, the only writer, who, in theseparticulars, can be compared with him: his imitator, Cicero, sinksin the comparison into an ape mocking the gestures of a man. Hisviews into the nature of mind and existence are often obscure, onlybecause they are profound; and though his theories respecting thegovernment of the world, and the elementary laws of moral action, are not always correct, yet there is scarcely any of his treatiseswhich do not, however stained by puerile sophisms, contain themost remarkable intuitions into all that can be the subject of thehuman mind. His excellence consists especially in intuition, andit is this faculty which raises him far above Aristotle, whosegenius, though vivid and various, is obscure in comparison withthat of Plato. 

The dialogue entitled the Banquet, is called [word in Greek], ora Discussion upon Love, and is supposed to have taken place at thehouse of Agathon, at one of a series of festivals given by thatpoet, on the occasion of his gaining the prize of tragedy at theDionysiaca. The account of the debate on this occasion is supposedto have been given by Apollodorus, a pupil of Socrates, manyyears after it had taken place, to a companion who was curious tohear it. This Apollodorus appears, both from the style in whichhe is represented in this piece, as well as from a passage in thePhaedon, to have been a person of an impassioned and enthusiasticdisposition; to borrow an image from the Italian painters, he seemsto have been the St. John of the Socratic group. The drama (for sothe lively distinction of character and the various and well-wroughtcircumstances of the story almost entitle it to be called) beginsby Socrates persuading Aristodemus to sup at Agathon's, uninvited. The whole of this introduction affords the most lively conceptionof refined Athenian manners. 

[1818; publ. 1840] [UNFINISHED]

A DEFENCE OF POETRY

PART I

According to one mode of regarding those two classes of mentalaction, which are called reason and imagination, the former may beconsidered as mind contemplating the relations borne by one thoughtto another, however produced; and the latter, as mind acting uponthose thoughts so as to colour them with its own light, and composingfrom them, as from elements, other thoughts, each containing withinitself the principle of its own integrity. The one is the [wordin Greek], or the principle of synthesis, and has for its objectsthose forms which are common to universal nature and existenceitself; the other is the [word in Greek], or principle of analysis, and its action regards the relations of things, simply as relations;considering thoughts, not in their integral unity, but as thealgebraical representations which conduct to certain general results. Reason is the enumeration of quantities already known; imaginationis the perception of the value of those quantities, both separatelyand as a whole. Reason respects the differences, and imaginationthe similitudes of things. Reason is to the imagination as theinstrument to the agent, as the body to the spirit, as the shadowto the substance. 

Poetry, in a general sense, may be defined to be 'the expressionof the imagination': and poetry is connate with the origin of man. Man is an instrument over which a series of external and internalimpressions are driven, like the alternations of an ever-changingwind over an Aeolian lyre, which move it by their motion toever-changing melody. But there is a principle within the humanbeing, and perhaps within all sentient beings, which acts otherwisethan in the lyre, and produces not melody alone, but harmony, by an internal adjustment of the sounds or motions thus excitedto the impressions which excite them. It is as if the lyre couldaccommodate its chords to the motions of that which strikes them, in a determined proportion of sound; even as the musician canaccommodate his voice to the sound of the lyre. A child at playby itself will express its delight by its voice and motions; andevery inflexion of tone and every gesture will bear exact relationto a corresponding antitype in the pleasurable impressions whichawakened it; it will be the reflected image of that impression;and as the lyre trembles and sounds after the wind has died away, so the child seeks, by prolonging in its voice and motions theduration of the effect, to prolong also a consciousness of thecause. In relation to the objects which delight a child, theseexpressions are, what poetry is to higher objects. The savage (forthe savage is to ages what the child is to years) expresses theemotions produced in him by surrounding objects in a similar manner;and language and gesture, together with plastic or pictorial imitation, become the image of the combined effect of those objects, and ofhis apprehension of them. Man in society, with all his passions andhis pleasures, next becomes the object of the passions and pleasuresof man; an additional class of emotions produces an augmentedtreasure of expressions; and language, gesture, and the imitativearts, become at once the representation and the medium, the penciland the picture, the chisel and the statue, the chord and theharmony. The social sympathies, or those laws from which, as fromits elements, society results, begin to develop themselves fromthe moment that two human beings coexist; the future is containedwithin the present, as the plant within the seed; and equality, diversity, unity, contrast, mutual dependence, become the principlesalone capable of affording the motives according to which thewill of a social being is determined to action, inasmuch as he issocial; and constitute pleasure in sensation, virtue in sentiment, beauty in art, truth in reasoning, and love in the intercourse ofkind. Hence men, even in the infancy of society, observe a certainorder in their words and actions, distinct from that of the objectsand the impressions represented by them, all expression beingsubject to the laws of that from which it proceeds. But let usdismiss those more general considerations which might involve aninquiry into the principles of society itself, and restrict ourview to the manner in which the imagination is expressed upon itsforms. 

In the youth of the world, men dance and sing and imitate naturalobjects, observing in these actions, as in all others, a certainrhythm or order. And, although all men observe a similar, theyobserve not the same order, in the motions of the dance, in themelody of the song, in the combinations of language, in the seriesof their imitations of natural objects. For there is a certainorder or rhythm belonging to each of these classes of mimeticrepresentation, from which the hearer and the spectator receivean intenser and purer pleasure than from any other: the senseof an approximation to this order has been called taste by modernwriters. Every man in the infancy of art observes an order whichapproximates more or less closely to that from which this highestdelight results: but the diversity is not sufficiently marked, asthat its gradations should be sensible, except in those instanceswhere the predominance of this faculty of approximation to thebeautiful (for so we may be permitted to name the relation betweenthis highest pleasure and its cause) is very great. Those in whomit exists in excess are poets, in the most universal sense of theword; and the pleasure resulting from the manner in which theyexpress the influence of society or nature upon their own minds, communicates itself to others, and gathers a sort or reduplicationfrom that community. Their language is vitally metaphorical; thatis, it marks the before unapprehended relations of things andperpetuates their apprehension, until the words which representthem become, through time, signs for portions or classes of thoughtsinstead of pictures of integral thoughts; and then if no new poetsshould arise to create afresh the associations which have been thusdisorganized, language will be dead to all the nobler purposes ofhuman intercourse. These similitudes or relations are finely saidby Lord Bacon to be 'the same footsteps of nature impressed uponthe various subjects of the world'; [Footnote: De Augment. Scient. , cap. I, lib. Iii. ] and he considers the faculty which perceivesthem as the storehouse of axioms common to all knowledge. In theinfancy of society every author is necessarily a poet, becauselanguage itself is poetry; and to be a poet is to apprehend thetrue and the beautiful, in a word, the good which exists in therelation, subsisting, first between existence and perception, andsecondly between perception and expression. Every original languagenear to its source is in itself the chaos of a cyclic poem: thecopiousness of lexicography and the distinctions of grammar are theworks of a later age, and are merely the catalogue and the form ofthe creations of poetry. 

But poets, or those who imagine and express this indestructibleorder, are not only the authors of language and of music, of thedance, and architecture, and statuary, and painting; they are theinstitutors of laws, and the founders of civil society, and theinventors of the arts of life, and the teachers, who draw into acertain propinquity with the beautiful and the true, that partialapprehension of the agencies of the invisible world which iscalled religion. Hence all original religions are allegorical, orsusceptible of allegory, and, like Janus, have a double face offalse and true. Poets, according to the circumstances of the age andnation in which they appeared, were called, in the earlier epochsof the world, legislators, or prophets: a poet essentially comprisesand unites both these characters. For he not only beholds intenselythe present as it is, and discovers those laws according to whichpresent things ought to be ordered, but he beholds the future inthe present, and his thoughts are the germs of the flower and thefruit of latest time. Not that I assert poets to be prophets inthe gross sense of the word, or that they can foretell the form assurely as they foreknow the spirit of events: such is the pretenceof superstition, which would make poetry an attribute of prophecy, rather than prophecy an attribute of poetry. A poet participatesin the eternal, the infinite, and the one; as far as relates tohis conceptions, time and place and number are not. The grammaticalforms which express the moods of time, and the difference of persons, and the distinction of place, are convertible with respect to thehighest poetry without injuring it as poetry; and the choruses ofAeschylus, and the book of Job, and Dante's Paradise, would afford, more than any other writings, examples of this fact, if the limitsof this essay did not forbid citation. The creations of sculpture, painting, and music, are illustrations still more decisive. 

Language, colour, form, and religious and civil habits of action, are all the instruments and materials of poetry; they may be calledpoetry by that figure of speech which considers the effect as asynonym of the cause. But poetry in a more restricted sense expressesthose arrangements of language, and especially metrical language, which are created by that imperial faculty; whose throne is curtainedwithin the invisible nature of man. And this springs from the natureitself of language, which is a more direct representation of theactions and passions of our internal being, and is susceptibleof more various and delicate combinations, than colour, form, ormotion, and is more plastic and obedient to the control of thatfaculty of which it is the creation. For language is arbitrarilyproduced by the imagination and has relation to thoughts alone;but all other materials, instruments and conditions of art, haverelations among each other, which limit and interpose betweenconception and expression The former is as a mirror which reflects, the latter as a cloud which enfeebles, the light of which both aremediums of communication. Hence the fame of sculptors, painters, and musicians, although the intrinsic powers of the great mastersof these arts may yield in no degree to that of those who haveemployed language as the hieroglyphic of their thoughts, has neverequalled that of poets in the restricted sense of the term, astwo performers of equal skill will produce unequal effects from aguitar and a harp. The fame of legislators and founders of religions, so long as their institutions last, alone seems to exceed that ofpoets in the restricted sense; but it can scarcely be a question, whether, if we deduct the celebrity which their flattery of thegross opinions of the vulgar usually conciliates, together withthat which belonged to them in their higher character of poets, any excess will remain. 

We have thus circumscribed the word poetry within the limits of thatart which is the most familiar and the most perfect expression ofthe faculty itself. It is necessary, however, to make the circlestill narrower, and to determine the distinction between measuredand unmeasured language; for the popular division into prose andverse is inadmissible in accurate philosophy. 

Sounds as well as thoughts have relation both between each otherand towards that which they represent, and a perception of the orderof those relations has always been found connected with a perceptionof the order of the relations of thoughts. Hence the language ofpoets has ever affected a certain uniform and harmonious recurrenceof sound, without which it were not poetry, and which is scarcelyless indispensable to the communication of its influence, than thewords themselves, without reference to that peculiar order. Hencethe vanity of translation; it were as wise to cast a violet into acrucible that you might discover the formal principle of its colourand odour, as seek to transfuse from one language into another thecreations of a poet. The plant must spring again from its seed, or it will bear no flower--and this is the burthen of the curse ofBabel. 

An observation of the regular mode of the recurrence of harmonyin the language of poetical minds, together with its relation tomusic, produced metre, or a certain system of traditional forms ofharmony and language. Yet it is by no means essential that a poetshould accommodate his language to this traditional form, so that theharmony, which is its spirit, be observed. The practice is indeedconvenient and popular, and to be preferred, especially in suchcomposition as includes much action: but every great poet mustinevitably innovate upon the example of his predecessors in theexact structure of his peculiar versification. The distinctionbetween poets and prose writers is a vulgar error. The distinctionbetween philosophers and poets has been anticipated. Plato wasessentially a poet--the truth and splendour of his imagery, and themelody of his language, are the most intense that it is possibleto conceive. He rejected the measure of the epic, dramatic, andlyrical forms, because he sought to kindle a harmony in thoughtsdivested of shape and action, and he forbore to invent any regularplan of rhythm which would include, under determinate forms, thevaried pauses of his style. Cicero sought to imitate the cadenceof his periods, but with little success. Lord Bacon was a poet. [Footnote: See the Filum Labyrinthi, and the Essay on Deathparticularly]. His language has a sweet and majestic rhythm, whichsatisfies the sense, no less than the almost superhuman wisdomof his philosophy satisfies the intellect; it is a strain whichdistends, and then bursts the circumference of the reader's mind, and pours itself forth together with it into the universal elementwith which it has perpetual sympathy. All the authors of revolutionsin opinion are not only necessarily poets as they are inventors, nor even as their words unveil the permanent analogy of thingsby images which participate in the life of truth; but as theirperiods are harmonious and rhythmical, and contain in themselvesthe elements of verse; being the echo of the eternal music. Nor arethose supreme poets, who have employed traditional forms of rhythmon account of the form and action of their subjects, less capableof perceiving and teaching the truth of things, than those whohave omitted that form. Shakespeare, Dante, and Milton (to confineourselves to modern writers) are philosophers of the very loftiestpower. 

A poem is the very image of life expressed in its eternal truth. There is this difference between a story and a poem, that a storyis a catalogue of detached facts, which have no other connexionthan time, place, circumstance, cause and effect; the other is thecreation of actions according to the unchangeable forms of humannature, as existing in the mind of the Creator, which is itselfthe image of all other minds. The one is partial, and applies onlyto a definite period of time, and a certain combination of eventswhich can never again recur; the other is universal, and containswithin itself the germ of a relation to whatever motives or actionshave place in the possible varieties of human nature. Time, whichdestroys the beauty and the use of the story of particular facts, stripped of the poetry which should invest them, augments that ofpoetry, and for ever develops new and wonderful applications of theeternal truth which it contains. Hence epitomes have been calledthe moths of just history; they eat out the poetry of it. A storyof particular facts is as a mirror which obscures and distorts thatwhich should be beautiful: poetry is a mirror which makes beautifulthat which is distorted. 

The parts of a composition may be poetical, without the compositionas a whole being a poem. A single sentence may be a considered asa whole, though it may be found in the midst of a series of unassimilatedportions: a single word even may be a spark of inextinguishablethought. And thus all the great historians, Herodotus, Plutarch, Livy, were poets; and although, the plan of these writers, especiallythat of Livy, restrained them; from developing this faculty inits highest degree, they made copious and ample amends for theirsubjection, by filling all the interstices of their subjects withliving images. 

Having determined what is poetry, and who are poets, let us proceedto estimate its effects upon society. 

Poetry is ever accompanied with pleasure: all spirits on which itfalls open themselves to receive the wisdom which is mingled withits delight. In the infancy of the world, neither poets themselvesnor their auditors are fully aware of the excellence of poetry:for it acts in a divine and unapprehended manner, beyond and aboveconsciousness; and it is reserved for future generations to contemplateand measure the mighty cause and effect in all the strength andsplendour of their union. Even in modern times, no living poet everarrived at the fullness of his fame; the jury which sits in judgementupon a poet, belonging as he does to all time, must be composedof his peers: it must be impanelled by Time from the selectest ofthe wise of many generations. A poet is a nightingale, who sitsin darkness and sings to cheer its own solitude with sweet sounds;his auditors are as men entranced by the melody of an unseenmusician, who feel that they are moved and softened, yet know notwhence or why. The poems of Homer and his contemporaries were thedelight of infant Greece; they were the elements of that socialsystem which is the column upon which all succeeding civilizationhas reposed. Homer embodied the ideal perfection of his age inhuman character; nor can we doubt that those who read his verseswere awakened to an ambition of becoming like to Achilles, Hector, and Ulysses the truth and beauty of friendship, patriotism, andpersevering devotion to an object, were unveiled to the depths inthese immortal creations: the sentiments of the auditors must havebeen refined and enlarged by a sympathy with such great and lovelyimpersonations, until from admiring they imitated, and from imitationthey identified themselves with the objects of their admiration. Nor let it be objected, that these characters are remote from moralperfection, and that they can by no means be considered as edifyingpatterns for general imitation. Every epoch, under names moreor less specious, has deified its peculiar errors; Revenge is thenaked idol of the worship of a semi-barbarous age; and Self-deceitis the veiled image of unknown evil, before which luxury and satietylie prostrate. But a poet considers the vices of his contemporariesas a temporary dress in which his creations must be arrayed, andwhich cover without concealing the eternal proportions of theirbeauty. An epic or dramatic personage is understood to wear themaround his soul, as he may the ancient armour or the modern uniformaround his body; whilst it is easy to conceive a dress more gracefulthan either. The beauty of the internal nature cannot be so farconcealed by its accidental vesture, but that the spirit of itsform shall communicate itself to the very disguise, and indicatethe shape it hides from the manner in which it is worn. A majesticform and graceful motions will express themselves through the mostbarbarous and tasteless costume. Few poets of the highest classhave chosen to exhibit the beauty of their conceptions in itsnaked truth and splendour; and it is doubtful whether the alloyof costume, habit, &c. , be not necessary to temper this planetarymusic for mortal ears. 

The whole objection, however, of the immorality of poetry restsupon a misconception of the manner in which poetry acts to producethe moral improvement of man. Ethical science arranges the elementswhich poetry has created, and propounds schemes and proposesexamples of civil and domestic life: nor is it for want of admirabledoctrines that men hate, and despise, and censure, and deceive, and subjugate one another. But poetry acts in another and divinermanner. It awakens and enlarges the mind itself by rendering itthe receptacle of a thousand unapprehended combinations of thought. Poetry lifts the veil from the hidden beauty of the world, and makesfamiliar objects be as if they were not familiar; it reproduces allthat it represents, and the impersonations clothed in its Elysianlight stand thenceforward in the minds of those who have oncecontemplated them as memorials of that gentle and exalted contentwhich extends itself over all thoughts and actions with which itcoexists. The great secret of morals is love; or a going out of ourown nature, and an identification of ourselves with the beautifulwhich exists in thought, action, or person, not our own. A man, to be greatly good, must imagine intensely and comprehensively; hemust put himself in the place of another and of many others; thepains and pleasures of his species must become his own. The greatinstrument of moral good is the imagination; and poetry administersto the effect by acting upon the cause. Poetry enlarges thecircumference of the imagination by replenishing it with thought ofever new delight, which have the power of attracting and assimilatingto their own nature all other thoughts, and which form new intervalsand interstices whose void for ever craves fresh food. Poetrystrengthens the faculty which is the organ of the moral natureof man, in the same manner as exercise strengthens a limb. A poettherefore would do ill to embody his own conceptions of right andwrong, which are usually those of his place and time, in his poeticalcreations, which participate in neither By this assumption of theinferior office of interpreting the effect in which perhaps afterall he might acquit himself but imperfectly, he would resign aglory in a participation in the cause. There was little danger thatHomer, or any of the eternal poets should have so far misunderstoodthemselves as to have abdicated this throne of their widest dominion. Those in whom the poetical faculty, though great, is less intense, as Euripides, Lucan, Tasso, Spenser, have frequently affected amoral aim, and the effect of their poetry is diminished in exactproportion to the degree in which they compel us to advert to thispurpose. 

Homer and the cyclic poets were followed at a certain intervalby the dramatic and lyrical poets of Athens, who flourishedcontemporaneously with all that is most perfect in the kindredexpressions of the poetical faculty; architecture, painting, musicthe dance, sculpture, philosophy, and, we may add, the forms ofcivil life. For although the scheme of Athenian society was deformedby many imperfections which the poetry existing in chivalry andChristianity has erased from the habits and institutions of modernEurope; yet never at any other period has so much energy, beauty, and virtue, been developed; never was blind strength and stubbornform so disciplined and rendered subject to the will of man, orthat will less repugnant to the dictates of the beautiful and thetrue, as during the century which preceded the death of Socrates. Of no other epoch in the history of our species have we recordsand fragments stamped so visibly with the image of the divinity inman. But it is poetry alone, in form, in action, or in language, which has rendered this epoch memorable above all others, and thestorehouse of examples to everlasting time. For written poetryexisted at that epoch simultaneously with the other arts, and it isan idle inquiry to demand which gave and which received the light, which all, as from a common focus, have scattered over the darkestperiods of succeeding time. We know no more of cause and effect thana constant conjunction of events: poetry is ever found to coexistwith whatever other arts contribute to the happiness and perfectionof man. I appeal to what has already been established to distinguishbetween the cause and the effect. 

It was at the period here adverted to, that the drama had its birth;and however a succeeding writer may have equalled or surpassedthose few great specimens of the Athenian drama which have beenpreserved to us, it is indisputable that the art itself never wasunderstood or practised according to the true philosophy of it, as at Athens. For the Athenians employed language, action, music, painting, the dance, and religious institutions, to produce a commoneffect in the representation of the highest idealisms of passionand of power; each division in the art was made perfect in its kindby artists of the most consummate skill, and was disciplined intoa beautiful proportion and unity one towards the other. On the modernstage a few only of the elements capable of expressing the imageof the poet's conception are employed at once. We have tragedywithout music and dancing; and music and dancing without the highestimpersonations of which they are the fit accompaniment, and bothwithout religion and solemnity. Religious institution has indeedbeen usually banished from the stage. Our system of divesting theactor's face of a mask, on which the many expressions appropriatedto his dramatic character might be moulded into one permanentand unchanging expression, is favourable only to a partial andinharmonious effect; it is fit for nothing but a monologue, whereall the attention may be directed to some great master of idealmimicry. The modern practice of blending comedy with tragedy, though liable to great abuse in point of practice, is undoubtedlyan extension of the dramatic circle; but the comedy should beas in KING LEAR, universal, ideal, and sublime. It is perhaps theintervention of this principle which determines the balance infavour of KING LEAR against the OEDIPUS TYRANNUS or the AGAMEMNON, or, if you will, the trilogies with which they are connected; unlessthe intense power of the choral poetry, especially that of thelatter, should be considered as restoring the equilibrium. KINGLEAR, if it can sustain this comparison, may be judged to be themost perfect specimen of the dramatic art existing in the world;in spite of the narrow conditions to which the poet was subjectedby the ignorance of the philosophy of the drama which has prevailedin modern Europe. Calderon, in his religious AUTOS, has attemptedto fulfil some of the high conditions of dramatic representationneglected by Shakespeare; such as the establishing a relationbetween the drama and religion and the accommodating them to musicand dancing; but he omits the observation of conditions stillmore important, and more is lost than gained by the substitutionof the rigidly-defined and ever-repeated idealisms of a distortedsuperstition for the living impersonations of the truth of humanpassion. 

But I digress. --The connexion of scenic exhibitions with theimprovement or corruption of the manners of men, has been universallyrecognized: in other words, the presence or absence of poetry inits most perfect and universal form, has been found to be connectedwith good and evil in conduct or habit. The corruption which hasbeen imputed to the drama as an effect, begins when the poetryemployed in its constitution ends: I appeal to the history of mannerswhether the periods of the growth of the one and the decline of theother have not corresponded with an exactness equal to any exampleof moral cause and effect. 

The drama at Athens, or wheresoever else it may have approachedto its perfection, ever co-existed with the moral and intellectualgreatness of the age. The tragedies of the Athenian poets areas mirrors in which the spectator beholds himself, under a thindisguise of circumstance, stript of all but that ideal perfectionand energy which every one feels to be the internal type of all thathe loves, admires, and would become. The imagination is enlargedby a sympathy with pains and passions so mighty, that they distendin their conception the capacity of that by which they are conceived;the good affections are strengthened by pity, indignation, terror, and sorrow; and an exalted calm is prolonged from the satiety ofthis high exercise of them into the tumult of familiar life: evencrime is disarmed of half its horror and all its contagion by beingrepresented as the fatal consequence of the unfathomable agenciesof nature; error is thus divested of its wilfulness; men can nolonger cherish it as the creation of their choice. In a drama ofthe highest order there is little food for censure or hatred; itteaches rather self-knowledge and self-respect. Neither the eyenor the mind can see itself, unless reflected upon that which itresembles. The drama, so long as it continues to express poetry, isas a prismatic and many-sided mirror, which collects the brightestrays of human nature and divides and reproduces them from thesimplicity of these elementary forms, and touches them with majestyand beauty, and multiplies all that it reflects, and endows it withthe power of propagating its like wherever it may fall. 

But in periods of the decay of social life, the drama sympathizeswith that decay. Tragedy becomes a cold imitation of the form ofthe great masterpieces of antiquity, divested of all harmoniousaccompaniment of the kindred arts; and often the very formmisunderstood, or a weak attempt to teach certain doctrines, whichthe writer considers as moral truths; and which are usually nomore than specious flatteries of some gross vice or weakness, withwhich the author, in common with his auditors, are infected. Hencewhat has been called the classical and domestic drama. Addison'sCATO is a specimen of the one; and would it were not superfluousto cite examples of the other! To such purposes poetry cannot bemade subservient. Poetry is a sword of lightning, ever unsheathed, which consumes the scabbard that would contain it. And thus weobserve that all dramatic writings of this nature are unimaginativein a singular degree; they affect sentiment and passion, which, divested of imagination, are other names for caprice and appetite. The period in our own history of the grossest degradation of thedrama is the reign of Charles II, when all forms in which poetryhad been accustomed to be expressed became hymns to the triumph ofkingly power over liberty and virtue. Milton stood alone illuminatingan age unworthy of him. At such periods the calculating principlepervades all the forms of dramatic exhibition, and poetry ceasesto be expressed upon them. Comedy loses its ideal universality:wit succeeds to humour; we laugh from self-complacency and triumph, instead of pleasure; malignity, sarcasm, and contempt, succeed tosympathetic merriment; we hardly laugh, but we Obscenity, whichis ever blasphemy against the divine beauty in life, becomes, fromthe very veil which it assumes, more active if less disgusting: itis a monster for which the corruption of society for ever bringsforth new food, which it devours in secret. 

The drama being that form under which a greater number of modesof expression of poetry are susceptible of being combined than anyother, the connexion of poetry and social good is more observablein the drama than in whatever other form. And it is indisputablethat the highest perfection of human society has ever correspondedwith the highest dramatic excellence; and that the corruption or theextinction of the drama in a nation where it has once flourished, is a mark of a corruption of manners and an extinction of theenergies which sustain the soul of social life. But, as Machiavellisays of political institutions, that life may be preserved andrenewed, if men should arise capable of bringing back the dramato its principles. And this is true with respect to poetry in itsmost extended sense: all language, institution and form, require notonly to be produced but to be sustained: the office and characterof a poet participates in the divine nature as regards providence, no less than as regards creation. 

Civil war, the spoils of Asia, and the fatal predominance first ofthe Macedonian, and then of the Roman arms, were so many symbolsof the extinction or suspension of the creative faculty in Greece. The bucolic writers, who found patronage under the lettered tyrantsof Sicily and Egypt, were the latest representatives of its mostglorious reign. Their poetry is intensely melodious, like the odourof the tuberose, it overcomes and sickens the spirit with excessof sweetness; whilst the poetry of the preceding age was as ameadow-gale of June, which mingles the fragrance all the flowersof the field, and adds a quickening and harmonizing spirit of itsown, which endows the sense with a power of sustaining its extremedelight. The bucolic and erotic delicacy in written poetry iscorrelative with that softness in statuary, music and the kindredarts, and even in manners and institutions, which distinguished theepoch to which I now refer. Nor is it the poetical faculty itself, or any misapplication of it, to which this want of harmony is tobe imputed. An equal sensibility to the influence of the sensesand the affections is to be found in the writings of Homer andSophocles: the former, especially, has clothed sensual and patheticimages with irresistible attractions. Their superiority over thesesucceeding writers consists in the presence of those thoughts whichbelong to the inner faculties of our nature, not in the absenceof those which are connected with the external: their incomparableperfection consists in a harmony of the union of all. It is notwhat the erotic poets have, but what they have not, in which theirimperfection consists. It is not inasmuch as they were poets, butinasmuch as they were not poets, that they can be considered withany plausibility as connected with the corruption of their age. Hadthat corruption availed so as to extinguish in them the sensibilityto pleasure, passion, and natural scenery, which is imputed to themas an imperfection, the last triumph of evil would have been achieved. For the end of social corruption is to destroy all sensibilityto pleasure; and, therefore, it is corruption. It begins at theimagination and the intellect as at the core, and distributes itselfthence as a paralysing venom, through the affections into the veryappetites, until all become a torpid mass in which hardly sensesurvives. At the approach of such a period, poetry ever addressesitself to those faculties which are the last to be destroyed, andits voice is heard, like the footsteps of Astraea, departing fromthe world. Poetry ever communicates all the pleasure which menare capable of receiving: it is ever still the light of life; thesource of whatever of beautiful or generous or true can have placein an evil time. It will readily be confessed that those among theluxurious citizens of Syracuse and Alexandria, who were delightedwith the poems of Theocritus, were less cold, cruel, and sensualthan the remnant of their tribe. But corruption must utterly havedestroyed the fabric of human society before poetry can ever cease. The sacred links of that chain have never been entirely disjoined, which descending through the minds of many men is attached to thosegreat minds, whence as from a magnet the invisible effluence issent forth, which at once connects, animates, and sustains the lifeof all. It is the faculty which contains within itself the seedsat once of its own and of social renovation. And let us notcircumscribe the effects of the bucolic and erotic poetry withinthe limits of the sensibility of those to whom it was addressed. They may have perceived the beauty of those immortal compositions, simply as fragments and isolated portions: those who are morefinely organized, or born in a happier age, may recognize them asepisodes to that great poem, which all poets, like the cooperatingthoughts of one great mind, have built up since the beginning ofthe world. 

The same revolutions within a narrower sphere had place in ancientRome; but the actions and forms of its social life never seem tohave been perfectly saturated with the poetical element. The Romansappear to have considered the Greeks as the selectest treasuriesof the selectest forms of manners and of nature, and to haveabstained from creating in measured language, sculpture, music, orarchitecture, anything which might bear a particular relation totheir own condition, whilst it should bear a general one to theuniversal constitution of the world. But we judge from partialevidence, and we judge perhaps partially Ennius, Varro, Pacuvius, and Accius, all great poets, have been lost. Lucretius is in thehighest, and Virgil in a very high sense, a creator. The chosendelicacy of expressions of the latter, are as a mist of light whichconceal from us the intense and exceeding truth of his conceptionsof nature. Livy is instinct with poetry. Yet Horace, Catullus, Ovid, and generally the other great writers of the Virgilian age, saw man and nature in the mirror of Greece. The institutions also, and the religion of Rome were less poetical than those of Greece, as the shadow is less vivid than the substance. Hence poetry inRome, seemed to follow, rather than accompany, the perfection ofpolitical and domestic society. The true poetry of Rome lived inits institutions; for whatever of beautiful, true, and majestic, they contained, could have sprung only from the faculty which createsthe order in which they consist. The life of Camillus, the death ofRegulus; the expectation of the senators, in their godlike state, of the victorious Gauls: the refusal of the republic to make peacewith Hannibal, after the battle of Cannae, were not the consequencesof a refined calculation of the probable personal advantage toresult from such a rhythm and order in the shows of life, to thosewho were at once the poets and the actors of these immortal dramas. The imagination beholding the beauty of this order, created it outof itself according to its own idea; the consequence was empire, and the reward everliving fame. These things are not the less poetryquid carent vate sacro. They are the episodes of that cyclic poemwritten by Time upon the memories of men. The Past, like an inspiredrhapsodist, fills the theatre of everlasting generations with theirharmony. 

At length the ancient system of religion and manners had fulfilledthe circle of its revolutions. And the world would have fallen intoutter anarchy and darkness, but that there were found poets amongthe authors of the Christian and chivalric systems of manners andreligion, who created forms of opinion and action never beforeconceived; which, copied into the imaginations of men, become asgenerals to the bewildered armies of their thoughts. It is foreignto the present purpose to touch upon the evil produced by thesesystems: except that we protest, on the ground of the principlesalready established, that no portion of it can be attributed tothe poetry they contain. 

It is probable that the poetry of Moses, Job, David, Solomon, andIsaiah, had produced a great effect upon the mind of Jesus and hisdisciples. The scattered fragments preserved to us by the biographersof this extraordinary person, are all instinct with the most vividpoetry. But his doctrines seem to have been quickly distorted. At a certain period after the prevalence of a system of opinionsfounded upon those promulgated by him, the three forms into whichPlato had distributed the faculties of mind underwent a sort ofapotheosis, and became the object of the worship of the civilizedworld. Here it is to be confessed that 'Light seems to thicken, 'and

 The crow makes wing to the rooky wood, Good things of day begin to droop and drowse, And night's black agents to their preys do rouze. 

But mark how beautiful an order has sprung from the dust andblood of this fierce chaos! how the world, as from a resurrection, balancing itself on the golden wings of knowledge and of hope, hasreassumed its yet unwearied flight into the heaven of time. Listento the music, unheard by outward ears, which is as a ceaseless andinvisible wind, nourishing its everlasting course with strengthand swiftness. 

The poetry in the doctrines of Jesus Christ, and the mythology andinstitutions of the Celtic conquerors of the Roman empire, outlivedthe darkness and the convulsions connected with their growth andvictory, and blended themselves in a new fabric of manners andopinion. It is an error to impute the ignorance of the dark ages tothe Christian doctrines or the predominance of the Celtic nations. Whatever of evil their agencies may have contained sprang from theextinction of the poetical principle, connected with the progressof despotism and superstition. Men, from causes too intricate to behere discussed, had become insensible and selfish: their own willhad become feeble, and yet they were its slaves, and thence theslaves of the will of others: lust, fear, avarice, cruelty, andfraud, characterized a race amongst whom no one was to be foundcapable of CREATING in form, language, or institution. The moralanomalies of such a state of society are not justly to be chargedupon any class of events immediately connected with them, and thoseevents are most entitled to our approbation which could dissolveit most expeditiously. It is unfortunate for those who cannotdistinguish words from thoughts, that many of these anomalies havebeen incorporated into our popular religion. 

It was not until the eleventh century that the effects of thepoetry of the Christian and chivalric systems began to manifestthemselves. The principle of equality had been discovered andapplied by Plato in his Republic, as the theoretical rule of themode in which the materials of pleasure and of power, produced bythe common skill and labour of human beings, ought to be distributedamong them. The limitations of this rule were asserted by himto be determined only by the sensibility of each, or the utilityto result to all. Plato, following the doctrines of Timaeus andPythagoras, taught also a moral and intellectual system of doctrine, comprehending at once the past, the present, and the future conditionof man. Jesus Christ divulged the sacred and eternal truths containedin these views to mankind, and Christianity, in its abstract purity, became the exoteric expression of the esoteric doctrines of thepoetry and wisdom of antiquity. The incorporation of the Celticnations with the exhausted population of the south, impressedupon it the figure of the poetry existing in their mythology andinstitutions. The result was a sum of the action and reaction ofall the causes included in it; for it may be assumed as a maxim thatno nation or religion can supersede any other without incorporatinginto itself a portion of that which it supersedes. The abolition ofpersonal and domestic slavery, and the emancipation of women froma great part of the degrading restraints of antiquity, were amongthe consequences of these events. 

The abolition of personal slavery is the basis of the highestpolitical hope that it can enter into the mind of man to conceive. The freedom of women produced the poetry of sexual love. Lovebecame a religion, the idols of whose worship were ever present. It was as if the statues of Apollo and the Muses had been endowedwith life and motion, and had walked forth among their worshippers;so that earth became peopled by the inhabitants of a diviner world. The familiar appearance and proceedings of life became wonderfuland heavenly, and a paradise was created as out of the wrecks ofEden. And as this creation itself is poetry, so its creators werepoets; and language was the instrument of their art: 'Galeotto fuil libro, e chi lo scrisse. ' The Provencal Trouveurs, or inventors, preceded Petrarch, whose verses are as spells, which unseal theinmost enchanted fountains of the delight which is in the grief oflove. It is impossible to feel them without becoming a portion ofthat beauty which we contemplate: it were superfluous to explainhow the gentleness and the elevation of mind connected with thesesacred emotions can render men more amiable, more generous and wise, and lift them out of the dull vapours of the little world of self. Dante understood the secret things of love even more than Petrarch. His Vita Nuova is an inexhaustible fountain of purity of sentimentand language: it is the idealized history of that period, and thoseintervals of his life which were dedicated to love. His apotheosisof Beatrice in Paradise, and the gradations of his own love and herloveliness, by which as by steps he feigns himself to have ascendedto the throne of the Supreme Cause, is the most glorious imaginationof modern poetry. The acutest critics have justly reversed thejudgement of the vulgar, and the order of the great acts of the'Divine Drama', in the measure of the admiration which they accordto the Hell, Purgatory, and Paradise. The latter is a perpetualhymn of everlasting love. Love, which found a worthy poet in Platoalone of all the ancients, has been celebrated by a chorus of thegreatest writers of the renovated world; and the music has penetratedthe caverns of society, and its echoes still drown the dissonanceof arms and superstition. At successive intervals, Ariosto, Tasso, Shakespeare, Spenser, Calderon, Rousseau, and the great writersof our own age, have celebrated the dominion of love, plantingas it were trophies in the human mind of that sublimest victoryover sensuality and force. The true relation borne to each otherby the sexes into which human kind is distributed, has becomeless misunderstood; and if the error which confounded diversitywith inequality of the powers of the two sexes has been partiallyrecognized in the opinions and institutions of modern Europe, weowe this great benefit to the worship of which chivalry was thelaw, and poets the prophets. 

The poetry of Dante may be considered as the bridge thrown overthe stream of time, which unites the modern and ancient world. Thedistorted notions of invisible things which Dante and his rivalMilton have idealized, are merely the mask and the mantle in whichthese great poets walk through eternity enveloped and disguised. It is a difficult question to determine how far they were consciousof the distinction which must have subsisted in their minds betweentheir own creeds and that of the people. Dante at least appears towish to mark the full extent of it by placing Riphaeus, whom Virgilcalls justissimns unus, in Paradise, and observing a most hereticalcaprice in his distribution of rewards and punishments. And Milton'spoem contains within itself a philosophical refutation of thatsystem, of which by a strange and natural antithesis, it has beena chief popular support. Nothing can exceed the energy and magnificenceof the character of Satan as expressed in Paradise Lost. It is amistake to suppose that he could ever have been intended for thepopular personification of evil. Implacable hate, patient cunning, and a sleepless refinement of device to inflict the extremestanguish on an enemy, these things are evil; and, although venialin a slave are not to be forgiven in a tyrant; although redeemedby much that ennobles his defeat in one subdued, are marked byall that dishonours his conquest in the victor. Milton's Devil asa moral being is as far superior to his God, as one who perseveresin some purpose which he has conceived to be excellent in spite ofadversity and torture, is to one who in the cold security of undoubtedtriumph inflicts the most horrible revenge upon his enemy, not fromany mistaken notion of inducing him to repent of a perseverance inenmity, but with the alleged design of exasperating him to deservenew torments. Milton has so far violated the popular creed (if thisshall be judged to be a violation) as to have alleged no superiorityof moral virtue to his God over his Devil. And this bold neglect ofa direct moral purpose is the most decisive proof of the supremacyof Milton's genius. He mingled as it were the elements of humannature as colours upon a single pallet, and arranged them in thecomposition of his great picture according to the laws of epictruth; that is, according to the laws of that principle by which aseries of actions of the external universe and of intelligent andethical beings is calculated to excite the sympathy of succeedinggenerations of mankind. The Divina Commedia and Paradise Lost haveconferred upon modern mythology a systematic form; and when changeand time shall have added one more superstition to the mass ofthose which have arisen and decayed upon the earth, commentatorswill be learnedly employed in elucidating the religion of ancestralEurope, only not utterly forgotten because it will have been stampedwith the eternity of genius. 

Homer was the first and Dante the second epic poet: that is, the second poet, the series of whose creations bore a defined andintelligible relation to the knowledge and sentiment and religionof the age in which he lived, and of the ages which followed it:developing itself in correspondence with their development. ForLucretius had limed the wings of his swift spirit in the dregs ofthe sensible world; and Virgil, with a modesty that ill became hisgenius, had affected the fame of an imitator, even whilst he createdanew all that he copied; and none among the flock of mock-birds, though their notes were sweet, Apollonius Rhodius, Quintus Calaber, Nonnus, Lucan, Statius, or Claudian, have sought even to fulfila single condition of epic truth. Milton was the third epic poet. For if the title of epic in its highest sense be refused to theAeneid, still less can it be conceded to the Orlando Furioso, theGerusalemme Liberata, the Lusiad, or the Fairy Queen. 

Dante and Milton were both deeply penetrated with the ancientreligion of the civilized world; and its spirit exists in theirpoetry probably in the same proportion as its forms survived inthe unreformed worship of modern Europe. The one preceded and theother followed the Reformation at almost equal intervals. Dantewas the first religious reformer, and Luther surpassed him ratherin the rudeness and acrimony, than in the boldness of his censuresof papal usurpation. Dante was the first awakener of entrancedEurope; he created a language, in itself music and persuasion, outof a chaos of inharmonious barbarisms. He was the congregator ofthose great spirits who presided over the resurrection of learning;the Lucifer of that starry flock which in the thirteenth centuryshone forth from republican Italy, as from a heaven, into thedarkness of the benighted world. His very words are instinct withspirit; each is as a spark, a burning atom of inextinguishablethought; and many yet lie covered in the ashes of their birth, andpregnant with a lightning which has yet found no conductor. Allhigh poetry is infinite; it is as the first acorn, which containedall oaks potentially. Veil after veil may be undrawn, and theinmost naked beauty of the meaning never exposed. A great poemis a fountain for ever overflowing with the waters of wisdom anddelight; and after one person and one age has exhausted all itsdivine effluence which their peculiar relations enable them toshare, another and yet another succeeds, and new relations are everdeveloped, the source of an unforeseen and an unconceived delight. 

The age immediately succeeding to that of Dante, Petrarch, andBoccaccio, was characterized by a revival of painting, sculpture, and architecture. Chaucer caught the sacred inspiration, and thesuperstructure of English literature is based upon the materialsof Italian invention. 

But let us not be betrayed from a defence into a critical historyof poetry and its influence on society. Be it enough to have pointedout the effects of poets, in the large and true sense of the word, upon their own and all succeeding times. 

But poets have been challenged to resign the civic crown to reasonersand mechanists, on another plea. It is admitted that the exerciseof the imagination is most delightful, but it is alleged that thatof reason is more useful. Let us examine as the grounds of thisdistinction, what is here meant by utility. Pleasure or good, in ageneral sense, is that which the consciousness of a sensitive andintelligent being seeks, and in which, when found, it acquiesces. There are two kinds of pleasure, one durable, universal andpermanent; the other transitory and particular. Utility may eitherexpress the means of producing the former or the latter. In theformer sense, whatever strengthens and purifies the affections, enlarges the imagination, and adds spirit to sense, is useful. Buta narrower meaning may be assigned to the word utility, confiningit to express that which banishes the importunity of the wants ofour animal nature, the surrounding men with security of life, thedispersing the grosser delusions of superstition, and the conciliatingsuch a degree of mutual forbearance among men as may consist withthe motives of personal advantage. 

Undoubtedly the promoters of utility, in this limited sense, havetheir appointed office in society. They follow the footsteps ofpoets, and copy the sketches of their creations into the book ofcommon life. They make space, and give time. Their exertions areof the highest value, so long as they confine their administrationof the concerns of the inferior powers of our nature within thelimits due to the superior ones. But whilst the sceptic destroysgross superstitions, let him spare to deface, as some of theFrench writers have defaced, the eternal truths charactered uponthe imaginations of men. Whilst the mechanist abridges, and thepolitical economist combines labour, let them beware that theirspeculations, for want of correspondence with those first principleswhich belong to the imagination, do not tend, as they have inmodern England, to exasperate at once the extremes of luxury andwant. They have exemplified the saying, 'To him that hath, moreshall be given; and from him that hath not, the little that he hathshall be taken away. ' The rich have become richer, and the poorhave become poorer; and the vessel of the state is driven betweenthe Scylla and Charybdis of anarchy and despotism. Such are theeffects which must ever flow from an unmitigated exercise of thecalculating faculty. 

It is difficult to define pleasure in its highest sense; thedefinition involving a number of apparent paradoxes. For, from aninexplicable defect of harmony in the constitution of human nature, the pain of the inferior is frequently connected with the pleasuresof the superior portions of our being. Sorrow, terror, anguish, despair itself, are often the chosen expressions of an approximationto the highest good. Our sympathy in tragic fiction depends on thisprinciple; tragedy delights by affording a shadow of the pleasurewhich exists in pain. This is the source also of the melancholywhich is inseparable from the sweetest melody. The pleasure thatis in sorrow is sweeter than the pleasure of pleasure itself. Andhence the saying, 'It is better to go to the house of mourning, thanto the house of mirth. ' Not that this highest species of pleasureis necessarily linked with pain. The delight of love and friendship, the ecstasy of the admiration of nature, the joy of the perceptionand still more of the creation of poetry, is often wholly unalloyed. 

The production and assurance of pleasure in this highest senseis true utility. Those who produce and preserve this pleasure arepoets or poetical philosophers. 

The exertions of Locke, Hume, Gibbon, Voltaire, Rousseau, [Footnote:Although Rousseau has been thus classed, he was essentially apoet. The others, even Voltaire, were mere reasoners. ] and theirdisciples, in favour of oppressed and deluded humanity, are entitledto the gratitude of mankind. Yet it is easy to calculate the degreeof moral and intellectual improvement which the world would haveexhibited, had they never lived. A little more nonsense would havebeen talked for a century or two; and perhaps a few more men, women, and children, burnt as heretics. We might not at this moment havebeen congratulating each other on the abolition of the Inquisitionin Spain. But it exceeds all imagination to conceive what would havebeen the moral condition of the world if neither Dante, Petrarch, Boccaccio, Chaucer, Shakespeare, Calderon, Lord Bacon, nor Milton, had ever existed; if Raphael and Michael Angelo had never beenborn; if the Hebrew poetry had never been translated; if a revivalof the study of Greek literature had never taken place; if nomonuments of ancient sculpture had been handed down to us; and ifthe poetry of the religion of the ancient world had been extinguishedtogether with its belief. The human mind could never, except bythe intervention of these excitements, have been awakened to theinvention of the grosser sciences, and that application of analyticalreasoning to the aberrations of society, which it is now attemptedto exalt over the direct expression of the inventive and creativefaculty itself. 

We have more moral, political and historical wisdom, than we knowhow to reduce into practice; we have more scientific and economicalknowledge than can be accommodated to the just distribution of theproduce which it multiplies. The poetry in these systems of thought, is concealed by the accumulation of facts and calculating processes. There is no want of knowledge respecting what is wisest and bestin morals, government, and political economy, or at least, whatis wiser and better than what men now practise and endure. But welet '_I_ DARE NOT wait upon I WOULD, like the poor cat in the adage. 'We want the creative faculty to imagine that which we know; wewant the generous impulse to act that which we imagine; we want thepoetry of life: our calculations have outrun conception; we haveeaten more than we can digest. The cultivation of those scienceswhich have enlarged the limits of the empire of man over theexternal world, has, for want of the poetical faculty, proportionallycircumscribed those of the internal world; and man, having enslavedthe elements, remains himself a slave. To what but a cultivationof the mechanical arts in a degree disproportioned to the presenceof the creative faculty, which is the basis of all knowledge, is to be attributed the abuse of all invention for abridging andcombining labour, to the exasperation of the inequality of mankind?From what other cause has it arisen that the discoveries which shouldhave lightened, have added a weight to the curse imposed on Adam?Poetry, and the principle of Self, of which money is the visible, incarnation, are the God and Mammon of the world. 

The functions of the poetical faculty are two-fold; by one itcreates new materials of knowledge and power and pleasure; by theother it engenders in the mind a desire to reproduce and arrangethem according to a certain rhythm and order which may be calledthe beautiful and the good. The cultivation of poetry is never moreto be desired than at periods when, from an excess of the selfishand calculating principle, the accumulation of the materials ofexternal life exceed the quantity of the power of assimilating themto the internal laws of human nature. The body has then become toounwieldy for that which animates it. 

Poetry is indeed something divine. It is at once the centre andcircumference of knowledge; it is that which comprehends all science, and that to which all science must be referred. It is at the sametime the root and blossom of all other systems of thought; it isthat from which all spring, and that which adorns all; and thatwhich, if blighted, denies the fruit and the seed, and withholdsfrom the barren world the nourishment and the succession of thescions of the tree of life. It is the perfect and consummate surfaceand bloom of all things; it is as the odour and the colour of therose to the texture of the elements which compose it, as the formand splendour of unfaded beauty to the secrets of anatomy andcorruption. What were virtue, love, patriotism, friendship--whatwere the scenery of this beautiful universe which we inhabit; whatwere our consolations on this side of the grave--and what were ouraspirations beyond it, if poetry did not ascend to bring light andfire from those eternal regions where the owl-winged faculty ofcalculation dare not ever soar? Poetry is not like reasoning, apower to be exerted according to the determination of the will. Aman cannot say, 'I will compose poetry. ' The greatest poet even cannotsay it; for the mind in creation is as a fading coal, which someinvisible influence, like an inconstant wind, awakens to transitorybrightness; this power arises from within, like the colour of aflower which fades and changes as it is developed, and the consciousportions of our natures are unprophetic either of its approach orits departure. Could this influence be durable in its originalpurity and force, it is impossible to predict the greatness of theresults; but when composition begins, inspiration is already on thedecline, and the most glorious poetry that has ever been communicatedto the world is probably a feeble shadow of the original conceptionsof the poet. I appeal to the greatest poets of the present day, whether it is not an error to assert that the finest passages ofpoetry are produced by labour and study. The toil and the delayrecommended by critics, can be justly interpreted to mean no morethan a careful observation of the inspired moments, and an artificialconnexion of the spaces between their suggestions by the intertextureof conventional expressions; a necessity only imposed by thelimitedness of the poetical faculty itself; for Milton conceivedthe Paradise Lost as a whole before he executed it in portions; Wehave his own authority also for the muse having 'dictated' to himthe 'unpremeditated song'. And let this be an answer to those whowould allege the fifty-six various readings of the first line ofthe Orlando Furioso. Compositions so produced are to poetry whatmosaic is to painting. This instinct and intuition of the poeticalfaculty, is still more observable in the plastic and pictorial arts;a great statue or picture grows under the power of the artist asa child in the mother's womb; and the very mind which directs thehands in formation is incapable of accounting to itself for theorigin, the gradations, or the media of the process. 

Poetry is the record of the best and happiest moments of the happiestand best minds. We are aware of evanescent visitations of thoughtand feeling sometimes associated with place or person, sometimesregarding our own mind alone, and always arising unforeseenand departing unbidden, but elevating and delightful beyond allexpression; so that even in the desire and regret they leave, therecannot but be pleasure, participating as it does in the natureof its object. It is as it were the interpenetration of a divinernature through our own; but its footsteps are like those of a windover the sea, which the coming calm erases, and whose traces remainonly, as on the wrinkled sand which paves it. These and correspondingconditions of being are experienced principally by those of themost delicate sensibility and the most enlarged imagination; and thestate of mind produced by them is at war with every base desire. The enthusiasm of virtue, love, patriotism, and friendship, is essentially linked with such emotions; and whilst they last, self appears as what it is, an atom to a universe. Poets are notonly subject to these experiences as spirits of the most refinedorganization, but they can colour all that they combine with theevanescent hues of this ethereal world; a word, a trait in therepresentation of a scene or a passion, will touch the enchantedchord, and reanimate, in those who have ever experienced theseemotions, the sleeping, the cold, the buried image of the past. Poetry thus makes immortal all that is best and most beautiful inthe world; it arrests the vanishing apparitions which haunt theinterlunations of life, and veiling them, or in language or in form, sends them forth among mankind, bearing sweet news of kindred joyto those with whom their sisters abide--abide, because there isno portal of expression from the caverns of the spirit which theyinhabit into the universe of things. Poetry redeems from decay thevisitations of the divinity in man. 

Poetry turns all things to loveliness; it exalts the beauty of thatwhich is most beautiful, and it adds beauty to that which is mostdeformed; it marries exultation and horror, grief and pleasure, eternity and change; it subdues to union under its light yoke, all irreconcilable things. It transmutes all that it touches, andevery form moving within the radiance of its presence is changedby wondrous sympathy to an incarnation of the spirit which itbreathes: its secret alchemy turns to potable gold the poisonouswaters which flow from death through life; it strips the veil offamiliarity from the world, and lays bare the naked and sleepingbeauty, which is the spirit of its forms. 

All things exist as they are perceived; at least in relation tothe percipient. 'The mind is its own place, and of itself can makea heaven of hell, a hell of heaven. ' But poetry defeats the cursewhich binds us to be subjected to the accident of surroundingimpressions. And whether it spreads its own figured curtain, or withdraws life's dark veil from before the scene of things, itequally creates for us a being within our being. It makes us theinhabitants of a world to which the familiar world is a chaos. It reproduces the common universe of which we are portions andpercipients, and it purges from our inward sight the film of familiaritywhich obscures from us the wonder of our being. It compels us tofeel that which we perceive, and to imagine that which we know. Itcreates anew the universe, after it has been annihilated in ourminds by the recurrence of impressions blunted by reiteration. It justifies the bold and true words of Tasso: Non merita nome dicreatore, se non Iddio ed il Poeta. 

A poet, as he is the author to others of the highest wisdom, pleasure, virtue and glory, so he ought personally to be the happiest, thebest, the wisest, and the most illustrious of men. As to his glory, let time be challenged to declare whether the fame of any otherinstitutor of human life be comparable to that of a poet. Thathe is the wisest, the happiest, and the best, inasmuch as he isa poet, is equally incontrovertible: the greatest poets have beenmen of the most spotless virtue, of the most consummate prudence, and, if we would look into the interior of their lives, the mostfortunate of men: and the exceptions, as they regard those whopossessed the poetic faculty in a high yet inferior degree, willbe found on consideration to confine rather than destroy the rule. Let us for a moment stoop to the arbitration of popular breath, andusurping and uniting in our own persons the incompatible charactersof accuser, witness, judge, and executioner, let us decide withouttrial, testimony, or form, that certain motives of those who are'there sitting where we dare not soar', are reprehensible. Letus assume that Homer was a drunkard, that Virgil was a flatterer, that Horace was a coward, that Tasso a madman, that Lord Bacon wasa peculator, that Raphael was a libertine, that Spenser was a poetlaureate. It is inconsistent with this division of our subjectto cite living poets, but posterity has done ample justice to thegreat names now referred to. Their errors have been weighed and foundto have been dust in the balance; if their sins 'were as scarlet, they are now white as snow'; they have been washed in the blood ofthe mediator and redeemer, Time. Observe in what a ludicrous chaosthe imputation of real or fictitious crime have been confused inthe contemporary calumnies against poetry and poets; consider howlittle is, as it appears--or appears, as it is; look to your ownmotives, and judge not, lest ye be judged. 

Poetry, as has been said, differs in this respect from logic, thatit is not subject to the control of the active powers of the mind, and that its birth and recurrence have no necessary connexion withthe consciousness or will. It is presumptuous to determine thatthese are the necessary conditions of all mental causation, whenmental effects are experienced unsusceptible of being referred tothem. The frequent recurrence of the poetical power, it is obviousto suppose, may produce in the mind a habit of order and harmonycorrelative with its own nature and its effects upon other minds. But in the intervals of inspiration, and they may be frequentwithout being durable, a poet becomes a man, and is abandoned tothe sudden reflux of the influences under which others habituallylive. But as he is more delicately organized than other men, andsensible to pain and pleasure, both his own and that of others, ina degree unknown to them, he will avoid the one and pursue the otherwith an ardour proportioned to this difference. And he rendershimself obnoxious to calumny, when he neglects to observe thecircumstances under which these objects of universal pursuit andflight have disguised themselves in one another's garments. 

But there is nothing necessarily evil in this error, and thuscruelty, envy, revenge, avarice, and the passions purely evil, havenever formed any portion of the popular imputations on the livesof poets. 

I have thought it most favourable to the cause of truth to set downthese remarks according to the order in which they were suggestedto my mind, by a consideration of the subject itself, instead ofobserving the formality of a polemical reply; but if the view whichthey contain be just, they will be found to involve a refutationof the arguers against poetry, so far at least as regards the firstdivision of the subject. I can readily conjecture what should havemoved the gall of some learned and intelligent writers who quarrelwith certain versifiers; I confess myself, like them, unwillingto be stunned, by the Theseids of the hoarse Codri of the day. Bavius and Maevius undoubtedly are, as they ever were, insufferablepersons. But it belongs to a philosophical critic to distinguishrather than confound. 

The first part of these remarks has related to poetry in itselements and principles; and it has been shown, as well as the narrowlimits assigned them would permit, that what is called poetry, ina restricted sense, has a common source with all other forms of orderand of beauty, according to which the materials of human life aresusceptible of being arranged, and which is poetry in a universalsense. 

The second part will have for its object an application of theseprinciples to the present state of the cultivation of poetry, anda defence of the attempt to idealize the modern forms of manners andopinions, and compel them into a subordination to the imaginativeand creative faculty. For the literature of England, an energeticdevelopment of which has ever preceded or accompanied a great andfree development of the national will, has arisen as it were from anew birth. In spite of the low-thoughted envy which would undervaluecontemporary merit, our own will be a memorable age in intellectualachievements, and we live among such philosophers and poetsas surpass beyond comparison any who have appeared since the lastnational struggle for civil and religious liberty. The most unfailingherald, companion, and follower of the awakening of a great peopleto work a beneficial change in opinion or institution, is poetry. At such periods there is an accumulation of the power of communicatingand receiving intense and impassioned conceptions respecting manand nature. The persons in whom this power resides may often, as faras regards many portions of their nature, have little apparentcorrespondence with that spirit of good of which they arethe ministers. But even whilst they deny and abjure, they are yetcompelled to serve, the power which is seated on the throne oftheir own soul. It is impossible to read the compositions of themost celebrated writers of the present day without being startledwith the electric life which burns within their words. They measurethe circumference and sound the depths of human nature with acomprehensive and all-penetrating spirit, and they are themselvesperhaps the most sincerely astonished at its manifestations; forit is less their spirit than the spirit of the age. Poets are thehierophants of an unapprehended inspiration; the mirrors of thegigantic shadows which futurity casts upon the present; the wordswhich express what they understand not; the trumpets which singto battle, and feel not what they inspire; the influence which ismoved not, but moves. Poets are the unacknowledged legislators ofthe world. 

THE END