And are not all these the genuine offspring of Imagination? Hence they are of one paternity, though not of one maternity. The eye, the ear, and the hand, has each its own peculiar sympathetic nerve. For, as all God's works are perfect, when and where He gives an eye to see or an ear to hear, He gives a hand to execute. This is the law; and as all God's laws are universal as perfect, there is no exception save from accident, or from something poetically styled a _lusus naturae_--a mere caprice or sport of Nature. But the philosophy of Poetry is not necessary to its existence any more than the astronomy of the heavens is to the brilliancy of the sun or to the splendors of a comet. A Poet is a creator, and his most perfect creature is a portraiture of any work of God or man; of any attribute of God or man in perfect keeping with Nature or with the original prototype, be it in fact or in fiction, in repose or in operation. Imitation is sometimes regarded as the test of poetic excellence. But what is imitation but the creation of an image! Alexander Pope so well imitates Homer, that, as an English critic once said, in speaking of his translation of that Prince of Grecian Poets--'a time might come, should the annals of Greece and England be confounded in some convulsion of Nature, when it might be a grave question of debate whether Pope translated Homer, or Homer Pope.' For our own part, we have never been able to decide to our own entire satisfaction, which excels in the true Heroic style. Pope, in his translation of the exordium of Homer, we think more than equals Homer himself: 'Achilles' wrath, to Greece the direful spring Of woes unnumbered, heavenly goddess, sing! That wrath which hurled to Pluto's dark domain The souls of mighty chiefs in battle slain; Whose limbs, unburied on the fatal shore, Devouring dogs and hungry vultures tore; Since great Achilles and Atrides strove, Such was the sovereign doom and such the will of Jove.'[18] We opine that Pope, being trammelled with a copy, and consequently his imagination cramped, displays every attribute of poetic genius fully equal, if not superior, to that of the beau ideal of the Grecian Muse. But Alexander Pope, of England, is not the Pope of English Poetry, a brother Poet being judge, for Dryden says: 'Three Poets, in three distant ages born, Greece, Italy, and England did adorn; The first in majesty of thought surpassed, The next in melody--in both the last: The force of Nature could no further go, To make the third she joined the other two.' And who awards not to Milton the richest medal in the Temple of the Muses! Not, perhaps, for the elegant diction and sublime imagery of his PARADISE LOST, but for his grand conceptions of Divinity in all its attributes, and of humanity in all its conditions, past, present, and future.