136 LIFE AND LETTERS OF JAMES GATES PERCIVAL. 



timental desire of the mind, and not by that concurring instinct 

 of all the faculties which is a self-forgetting passion of the entire 

 man. Too excitable to possess his subject fully, as a man of 

 mere talent may often do, he is not possessed by it as the man 

 of genius is, and seems helplessly striving, the greater part of the 



(time, to make out what, in the name of common or uncommon 

 sense, he is after. With all the stock properties of verse whirling 

 and dancing about his ears puffed out to an empty show of life, 

 the reader of much of his blank verse feels as if a mob of well- 

 draperied clothes-lines were rioting about him in all the un 

 willing ecstacy of a thunder-gust. 



Percival living from 1795 to 1856, arrived at manhood just 

 as the last war with England had. come to an end. Poor, shy, 

 and proud, there is nothing in his earlier years that might not 

 be paralleled in those of hundreds of sensitive boys who gra 

 dually get the nonsense shaken out of them in the rough school 

 of life. The length of the schooling needful in his case is what 

 makes it peculiar. Not till after he was fifty, if even then, did 

 he learn that the world never takes a man at his own .valuation, 

 and never pays money for what it does not want, or think it 

 wants. It did not want his poetry, simply because it was not, is 

 not, and by no conceivable power of argument can be made, 

 interesting the first duty of every artistic product. Percival, 

 who would have thought his neighbours mad if they had insisted 

 on his buying twenty thousand refrigerators merely because they 

 had been at the trouble of making them, and found it convenient 

 to turn them into cash, could never forgive the world for taking 

 this business view of the matter in his own case. He went on 

 doggedly, making refrigerators of every possible pattern, and 

 comforted himself with the thought of a wiser posterity, which 

 should have learned that the purpose of poetry is to cool and 

 not to kindle. His Mind/ which is on the whole perhaps the 

 best of his writings, vies in coldness with the writings of his 

 brother doctor, Akenside, whose Pleasures of Imagination are 

 something quite other than pleasing in reality. If there be here 

 and there a semblance of pale fire, it is but the reflection of 

 moonshine upon ice. Akenside is respectable, because he really 

 had something new to say, in spite of his pompous, mouthing 

 way of saying it ; but when Percival says it over again, it is a 

 little too much. In his more ambitious pieces and it is curious 

 how literally the word pieces ; applies to all he did he devotes 

 himself mainly to telling us what poetry ought to be, as if 

 mankind were not always more than satisfied with anyone who 



