with his pen as his sword, hailed the _Faerie Queene_ of his friend Spenser in verses in which he said that ‘Petrarch’ was thenceforward to be no more heard of; and that in all English poetry, there was nothing he counted ‘of any price’ but the effusions of the new author. Yet Petrarch is still living; Chaucer was not abolished by Sir Walter; and Shakespeare is thought somewhat valuable. A botanist might as well have said, that myrtles and oaks were to disappear, because acacias had come up. It is with the poet’s creations, as with nature’s, great or small. Wherever truth and beauty, whatever their amount, can be worthily shaped into verse, and answer to some demand for it in our hearts, there poetry is to be found; whether in productions grand and beautiful as some great event, or some mighty, leafy solitude, or no bigger and more pretending than a sweet face or a bunch of violets; whether in Homer’s epic or Gray’s _Elegy_, in the enchanted gardens of Ariosto and Spenser, or the very pot-herbs of the _Schoolmistress_ of Shenstone, the balms of the simplicity of a cottage. Not to know and feel this, is to be deficient in the universality of Nature herself, who is a poetess on the smallest as well as the largest scale, and who calls upon us to admire all her productions; not indeed with the same degree of admiration, but with no refusal of it, except to defect. I cannot draw this essay towards its conclusion better than with three memorable words of Milton; who has said, that poetry, in comparison with science, is ‘simple, sensuous, and passionate’. By simple, he means unperplexed and self-evident; by sensuous, genial and full of imagery; by passionate, excited and enthusiastic. I am aware that different constructions have been put on some of these words; but the context seems to me to necessitate those before us. I quote, however, not from the original, but from an extract in the _Remarks on Paradise Lost_ by Richardson. What the poet has to cultivate above all things is love and truth;--what he has to avoid, like poison, is the fleeting and the false. He will get no good by proposing to be ‘in earnest at the moment’. His earnestness must be innate and habitual; born with him, and felt to be his most precious inheritance. ‘I expect neither profit nor general fame by my writings,’ says Coleridge, in the Preface to his Poems; ‘and I consider myself as having been amply repaid without either. Poetry has been to me its “_own exceeding great reward_”; it has soothed my afflictions; it has multiplied and refined my enjoyments; it has endeared solitude; and it has given me the habit of wishing to discover the good and the beautiful in all that meets and surrounds me.’