92 On Definitions. 
The terms employed in the higher departments of rhetoric and 
criticism, and all discussions on language are equally vague with 
- those that have been mentioned, and equally incapable of strict defi- 
nition. All such terms as figure, simile, personification, hyperbole, 
concise, diffuse, elegant, simple, sublime in style, prose, poetry, his- 
tory, pastoral and didactic poetry, and numberless others of a similar 
nature, admit of no precise definitions. The ideas conveyed by them, 
run into each other like tbe colors of the rainbow, and cannot be pre- 
cisely discrirninated. We are not indeed, to suppose, that the use 
of these words and phrases, is always uncertain. Many of their 
applications, perhaps the greatest number of them, are accompanied 
with no uncertainty. But there are others in which their use will 
always be doubtful. There can be no difficulty in distinguishing an 
ordinary Epic Poem from a Tragedy or a Pastoral. But there are 
poems of which it is not easy to say, to what class they belong, 
And of some works written by eminent authors, there are disputes 
whether they are to be considered as prose or poetry. 
One figure that we meet with, may be decidedly a comparison } 
but of another, we cannot tell whether it is a metaphor, ora pro- 
sopopeia, or an apostrophe. And when we come to determine the 
propriety of its application, we are still in greater difficulty, and 
must employ much analogical reasoning; we must appeal to the 
vague dictates of Taste; we must call up the feelings of the heart, 
which differ widely in different men. Who can define elegance m 
writing? Who can tell in what simplicity consists? Who can de- 
scribe in what consists that nameless grace in so many favorite au- 
thors which all delight to peruse, which appear to all so easy to im- 
itate, but which so few have the fortune to acquire the power of 
transfusing into their writings ? 
Since in these departments of knowledge, the terms in most com- 
mon use, are so vague, and so little subjected to precise limitation, 
it can hardly be doubted that the whole system of precepts and 
speculations in these departments, possesses the same vagueness, the 
same antipathy to precise limitation and control. The whole of 
those speculations which are designated by the Belles Lettres, Crit- 
icism and Literature, as far as they consist of judgments upon the 
performances of Literary Authors, are made up of appeals*to the 
feelings of the heart, and are more or less just, according to the 
power which the writer possesses in embodying his own feelings, OF 
in first observing, and then of embodying those of others. 
