Ford was of the first order of poets. He sought for sublimity, not by parcels in metaphors or visible images, but directly where she has her full residence in the heart of man; in the actions and sufferings of the greatest minds. There is a grandeur of the soul above mountains, seas, and the elements. Even in the poor perverted reason of Giovanni and Annabella (in the play which precedes this) we discern traces of that fiery particle, which in the irregular starting out of the road of beaten action, discovers something of a right line even in obliquity and shows hints of an improvable greatness in the lowest descents and degradations of our nature. PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY. (1792-1822) IX. A DEFENCE OF POETRY. _The Defence of Poetry_ was written in the early months of 1821, the year before Shelley's death. Its immediate occasion was an essay on _The Four Ages of Poetry_ by T L Peacock. But all allusions to Peacock's work were cut out by John Hunt when he prepared it--in vain, as things proved--for publication in _The Liberal_, and it remains, as Peacock said, "a defence without an attack". For all essential purposes, the _Defence_ can only be said to have gained by shaking off its local and temporary reference. It expresses Shelley's deepest thoughts about poetry, and marks, as clearly as any writing of the last hundred years, the width of the gulf that separates the ideals of recent poetry from those of the century preceding the French Revolution. It may be compared with Sidney's _Apologie_ on the one hand, and with Wordsworth's Preface to the _Lyrical Ballads_, or the more abstract parts of Carlyle's critical writings upon the other. The fundamental conceptions of Shelley are the same as those of the Elizabethan critic and of his own great contemporaries. But he differs from Sidney and Wordsworth, and perhaps from Carlyle also, in laying more stress upon the outward form, and particularly the musical element, of poetry, and from Sidney in laying less stress upon its directly moral associations. He thus attains to a wider and truer view of his subject, and, while insisting as strongly as Wordsworth insists upon the kinship between the matter of poetry and that of truth or science, he also recognizes, as Wordsworth commonly did not, that there is a harmony between the imaginative conception of that matter and its outward expression, and that beautiful thought must necessarily clothe itself in beauty of language and of sound. There is not in our literature any clearer presentment of the inseparable connection between the matter and form of poetry, nor of the ideal element which, under different shapes, is the life and soul of both. [See Shelley's letters to Peacock and Other of February 15 and 22, and of March 20 and 21, 1821]