An Italian critic, following a division made by Plotinus, has distributed the poets into three classes, which he calls the musical, the amatorial, and the philosophic. In the first, he places those who are studious of softness and harmony in their numbers; in the second, such as content themselves with describing accurately the outward appearances of real or fanciful objects; and in the third, those who penetrate to the qualities of things, draw out their hidden beauties, and separate what is really and truly fair from that which has only its exterior semblance. Among the second of these, Darwin might claim for himself no mean station. It was, indeed, a notion he had taken up, that as the ideas derived from visible objects (to use his own words) are more distinct than those derived from any other source, the words expressive of those ideas belonging to vision make up the principal part of poetic language. So entirely was he engrossed by this persuasion, as, too frequently, to forget that the admirers of poetry have not only eyes but ears and hearts also; and that therefore harmony and pathos are required of the poet, no less than a faithful delineation of visible objects. Yet there is something in his versification also that may be considered as his own. His numbers have less resemblance to Pope's, than Pope's to those of Dryden. Whether the novelty be such as to reflect much credit on the inventor, is another question. His secret, was, I think, to take those lines in Pope which seemed to him the most diligently elaborated, and to model his own upon them. But with those forms of verse which he borrowed more particularly from Pope, in which one part is equally balanced by the other, and of which each is complete in itself without reference to those which precede or follow it, he has mingled one or two others that had been used by our elder poets, but almost entirely rejected by the refiners of the couplet measure till the time of Langhorne; as where the substantive and its epithet are so placed, that the latter makes the end of an iambic in the second, and the former the beginning of a trochee in the third foot. And showers | th[)e] st[=i]ll | sn[=o]w fr[)o]m | his hoary urns. _Darwin, Botanic Garden_, p. I, c. 2, 28. Or dart | th[)e] r[=e]d | fl[=a]sh thr[)o]ugh | the circling band. _Ibid_. 361. Or rests | h[)e]r fa[=i]r | ch[=e]ek [)o]n | his curled brows. _Ibid_. c. 2, 252. Deserve | [)a] sw[=e]et | l[=o]ok fr[)o]m | Demetrius' eye. _Shakspeare, Mid. N. D._ Infect | th[)e] so[=u]nd | p[=i]ne [)a]nd | divert his grain. _Shakespeare, Tempest._ Which on | thy s[=o]ft | ch[=e]ek f[)o]r | complexion dwells. _Shakspeare, Sonnet_ 99. To lay | th[)e]ir j[=u]st | h[=a]nds [)o]n | the golden key. _Milton, Comus_. Or where they make the end of an iambic in the first, and the beginning of a spondee in the second foot, as Th[)e] w[=a]n | st[=a]rs gl[=i]m|mering through its silver train. _Botanic Garden_, p. I, c. I, 135.