4. Opinions, feelings, manners, and customs are made poetical by the delicacy or splendor with which they are expressed. This is seen in the _ode_, _elegy_, _sonnet_, and _ballad_, in which a single idea, perhaps, or familiar occurrence, is 20 invested by the poet with pathos or dignity. The ballad of _Old Robin Gray_ will serve for an instance out of a multitude; again, Lord Byron's _Hebrew Melody_, beginning, "Were my bosom as false," etc.; or Cowper's _Lines on his Mother's Picture_; 25 or Milman's _Funeral Hymn_ in the Martyr of Antioch; or Milton's _Sonnet on his Blindness_; or Bernard Barton's _Dream_. As picturesque specimens, we may name Campbell's _Battle of the Baltic_; or Joanna Baillie's _Chough and Crow_; 30 and for the more exalted and splendid style, Gray's _Bard_; or Milton's _Hymn on the Nativity_; in which facts, with which every one is familiar, are made new by the coloring of a poetical imagination. It must all along be observed, that we are not adducing instances for their own sake; 5 but in order to illustrate our general doctrine, and to show its applicability to those compositions which are, by universal consent, acknowledged to be poetical. The department of poetry we are now speaking 10 of is of much wider extent than might at first sight appear. It will include such moralizing and philosophical poems as Young's _Night Thoughts_, and Byron's _Childe Harold_. There is much bad taste, at present, in the judgment passed on 15 compositions of this kind. It is the fault of the day to mistake mere eloquence for poetry; whereas, in direct opposition to the conciseness and simplicity of the poet, the talent of the orator consists in making much of a single idea. "Sic dicet ille ut 20 verset sæpe multis modis eandem et unam rem, ut hæreat in eâdem commoreturque sententiâ." This is the great art of Cicero himself, who, whether he is engaged in statement, argument, or raillery, never ceases till he has exhausted the 25 subject; going round about it, and placing it in every different light, yet without repetition to offend or weary the reader. This faculty seems to consist in the power of throwing off harmonious verses, which, while they have a respectable portion of 30 meaning, yet are especially intended to charm the ear. In popular poems, common ideas are unfolded with copiousness, and set off in polished verse--and this is called poetry. Such is the character of Campbell's _Pleasures of Hope_; it is in his minor poems that the author's poetical 5 genius rises to its natural elevation. In _Childe Harold_, too, the writer is carried through his Spenserian stanza with the unweariness and equable fullness of accomplished eloquence;