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 the colors of the rainbow, and cannot be pre- 

 cisely discriminated. 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, or a 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 in 

 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 Jcnowledge, 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, or 

 in first observing, and then of embodying those of others. 



