exuberant genius; and yet maintain that the scenes in question contain much incidental poetry. 5 Now and then the luster of the true metal catches the eye, redeeming whatever is unseemly and worthless in the rude ore; still the ore is not the metal. Nay, sometimes, and not unfrequently in Shakspeare, the introduction of unpoetical 10 matter may be necessary for the sake of relief, or as a vivid expression of recondite conceptions, and, as it were, to make friends with the reader's imagination. This necessity, however, cannot make the additions in themselves beautiful and 15 pleasing. Sometimes, on the other hand, while we do not deny the incidental beauty of a poem, we are ashamed and indignant on witnessing the unworthy substance in which that beauty is embedded. This remark applies strongly to the 20 immoral compositions to which Lord Byron devoted his last years. Now to proceed with our proposed investigation. 1. We will notice _descriptive poetry_ first. 25 Empedocles wrote his physics in verse, and Oppian his history of animals. Neither were poets--the one was an historian of nature, the other a sort of biographer of brutes. Yet a poet may make natural history or philosophy the 30 material of his composition. But under his hands they are no longer a bare collection of facts or principles, but are painted with a meaning, beauty, and harmonious order not their own. Thomson has sometimes been commended for the novelty and minuteness of his remarks upon 5 nature. This is not the praise of a poet, whose office rather is to represent known phenomena in a new connection or medium. In _L'Allegro_ and _Il Penseroso_ the poetical magician invests the commonest scenes of a country life with the hues, 10 first of a cheerful, then of a pensive imagination. It is the charm of the descriptive poetry of a religious mind, that nature is viewed in a moral connection. Ordinary writers, for instance, compare aged men to trees in autumn--a gifted 15 poet will in the fading trees discern the fading men.[43] Pastoral poetry is a description of rustics, agriculture, and cattle, softened off and corrected from the rude health of nature. Virgil, and much more Pope and others, have run into 20 the fault of coloring too highly; instead of drawing generalized and ideal forms of shepherds, they have given us pictures of gentlemen and beaux. Their composition may be poetry, but it is not pastoral poetry. 25 [43] Thus:-- "How quiet shows the woodland scene! Each flower and tree, its duty done, Reposing in decay serene, Like weary men when age is won," etc.