places at all distances from each other. And yet it is equally true that in every moral or spiritual revolution there is always a leader, a forerunner, a man of originality, in whose individual bosom the movement seems to have been rehearsed and epitomized, and that in the beginning of every such revolution the power of contagion from man to man, and the machinery of the clique, school, or phalanx, must come into play.

These remarks are not too remote or abstract for

the present occasion. The nineteenth century is a sufficiently large portion of historic time, England is a sufficiently large portion of the historic earth, and the poetical literature of England, or of any other nation, is a sufficiently important element in that nation's existence, to justify our viewing that remarkable phenomenon, the Revival of English Poetry in the Nineteenth Century, in the light of the most extreme general conceptions that can be brought to bear upon it. Against the preceding observations, therefore, as against what seems an appropriate background, let us try to bring out the main features of the phenomenon itself, so far, at least, as these can be exhibited with reference to the life and writings of its most "representative man." And first of Wordsworth regarded historically.

From Dryden till about fifty years ago (i.e. till about

1800), say our authorities in literary history, was an era of poetical sterility in England. When Coleridge gave lectures in London on the English poets, he divided them into three lists or sections-the first, including all the poets from Chaucer to Dryden; the second, all those from Dryden inclusively to the close of the eighteenth century; and the third, all those of his own generation. The view presented by him of the characters of these three periods, relatively to each other, was essentially that conveyed in the strange theory of alternate ebb and flow, alternate immission and withdrawal of power, as regulating the progress of the universe. In other words, the first period was a period of strength, youth, and outburst; the second was a period of cleverness, conceit, and poverty; and the third was a period of revival. For, the poetic spirit being one constant thing, a certain specific and invariable quality or state of the human soul, not capable of change from century to century, but the same of old, now, and for ever, it follows that the history of poetry can present no other appearance than that of alternate presence and absence, alternate excess and deficiency, alternate extinction and renovation. That is to say-accepting the poetry of Chaucer and Milton as true poetry, we cannot go on to defend the poetry of Pope and Johnson as true poetry of a different kind, and then, coming down to our own

age, assert that its poetry is true poetry of a different kind still. Except in a very obvious sense, rendered necessary by convenience, it cannot be said that there are kinds of poetry. The materials on which the poetic sense works are constantly varying; infinite, also, are the combinations of human faculty and will with which this sense may be structurally associated; but the sense itself, whensoever and in whomsoever it may be found, is still the same old thing that trembled in the heart of Homer. An age may have it or want it; may have more of it or less of it; may have it in conjunction with this or with that aggregate of other characteristics; but cannot abandon one form of it and take up another.

In these remarks we have embodied a very necessary caution. If much good has been done by that exaltation of meaning which the words Poet and Poetry have received from the hands of Coleridge and others, as well as by their kindred services in distinguishing so constantly and so emphatically between the terms reason and understanding, genius and talent, creation and criticism, we are not quite sure but that, at the same time, this infusion of new conceptions into our language has been productive of some mischief. Agreeing, upon the whole, with the sentence of condemnation which has been of late passed upon part of the poor eighteenth century; believing that it was a critical,

negative, and unpoetic age; nay, even believing (however the belief is to be reconciled with the doctrine of continuous historic evolution) that it was one of those seasons of comparative diminution of the general vital energy of our species which we have already spoken of: we still think that too sweeping a use has been made of this notion and its accessories by a certain class of writers. Let us illustrate our meaning by an example. Keats, the poet, and James Mill, the historian of India, were contemporaries. The one, according to the language introduced by Coleridge, was a man of genius; the other was a man of talent. In the soul of Keats, if ever in a human soul at all, there was a portion of the real poetic essence-the real faculty divine; Mr. Mill, on the other hand, had probably as little of the poet in his composition as any celebrated man of his time, but he was a man of hard metal, of real intellectual strength, and of unyielding rectitude. In certain exercises of the mind he could probably have crushed Keats, who was no weakling, as easily as a giant could crush a babe. But, suppose the two men to have sat together on Hampstead Heath in a starry night, which of them would then have been the stronger-which would have known the more ecstatic pulses? Or, to make the case still more decisive, suppose the two men to have been Keats and Aristotle-Keats a consumptive poetic boy, and Aristotle

the intellect of half a world. Does not such a contrast bring out the real injustice that has been done to many truly great and good men by the habit which, since the time of Coleridge, has become general, of placing all the men that belong to the so-called category of genius in one united mass above all that rank only in the category of talent? For, though we may grant the reality of some such distinction as is implied between the two substantives, is it not clear that the general mass of mind possessed by a man reputed to belong to the inferior category, and consequently his general power to influence the soul of the world, may exceed a thousand times that possessed by a man of the other? In other words, may not a man rank so high in the one kind that, even though the kind itself be inferior, it may be said with truth that he is a hundred times greater a man than some specified lower man in the other? Practically, the tenor of these remarks is that we are in the present day committing an injustice by following the tendency of our young Coleridgians to restrict the meaning of the quantitative word "greatness" within the limits of the merely qualitative word "genius." And, speculatively, their tenor may be expressed in the proposition that this quality or mode of mind called genius, the poetic sense, creative power, and so on, may exist in association with all possible varieties of intellectual