PASSIOX AXD IMAGINATION IX POKT1JY 7v!9 



wilful person. 2 By his third epithet Milton, as most will agree, touched 

 or almost touched the heart of the matter. We all conceive prose to be 

 an adequate vehicle for our level feelings, but as soon as we are deeply 

 moved and wish to express our emotion we instinctively turn to the 

 poets. Wordsworth is at one with Milton in fixing upon passion as of 

 the essence of poetry, which he in one place defines as " the spontane- 

 ous overflow of powerful feeling?." It does not matter for poetry what 

 the emotion is that overflows; it may be love or hale, pity or fear, awe 

 or indignation, joy or sorrow; what matters for poetry is that some 

 passion there should be, for some paticular object, and that it should 

 be sincerely and deeply felt. 



Essential, however, as passion is, so that where there is no passion 

 there can be no poetry, in saying passion we have not said the last 

 word. Any one may prove this to himself by a simple reminiscence. 

 He may at some time have been in love, for, according to Patmore, 

 "Love wakes men once a lifetime each:" and, perhaps, in a mood of 

 exaltation he may have taken pen and paper for a sonnet to his mis- 

 tress' eyebrow; but the poetry did not come; or, if something came, in 

 a calmer mood he recognized that it was not poetry. Or we may 

 illustrate from other passions. At the Queen's Jubilee a few years 

 since we were all passionately loyal, and the morning newspapers vied 

 with each other in producing odes; but no one could mistake any one 

 of them for poetry. Or, the other day, again, when the Konnos ver- 

 dict was announced, the intelligence of England was roused to a pas- 

 sion of indignation. I took up my weekly gazette the next Saturday 

 morning and found that indignation had made a good many versos, in 

 none of which was there a tincture of poetry. There was much curs- 

 ing and swearing, and appealing to Heaven for vengeance; but the 

 point of view was merely that of the man in the street. 



These simple examples will sullice to show that poetry requires a 

 manner of viewing things which is not that of the average man. but 

 is individual to the poet: it, require: 

 hardly expect Milton to point this 

 would assume that every one 

 assume that wo all had the power 



-The tradition of this concrojoness was not lo>t even in the eighteenth 

 century. Poets, living in a time of ab-tract thought. an<l feeling linger the 

 necessity of handling abstractions which they mi-took for universal*, hit upon 

 the device of personifying them, with the result that from the jiaire- of 

 Dodsley's ^Miscellany every family of ! lie mind and every operation of every 

 science look* <~nir at one with a capital letter, a fashion happilv pai 

 in the famous line: 



Gray is not untouched with the malady, though, on the whole, he represents 

 a reaction hack to the richness of the concrete, the " pomp and prodigality" 

 of Shakespeare and Milton. 



