Consequently poetry has the power of harming the good, for a good man will be in raptures at the excellences of the poet who stirs his feelings most by representing a hero in an emotional condition.

Ay, sir, there was even crackers for mother an' son to pull together, with scraps o' poetry inside.

Nevertheless it cannot be denied that side by side with these gross and barbarous morals, this social disorder, there existed knightly morality and knightly poetry.

Dorothea is presented as capable of becoming a saint, being of an ardent, heroic nature, a woman who yearned after some lofty conception of the world that was to be made, not merely poetry, but an actual fact about her; who was "enamoured of intensity and greatness," and "likely to seek martyrdom."

VII The blighting influence of constitutional strife and intestine war which followed in the Stuarts' reigns turned the serious artist's thoughts aside to grave and prophetic forms of literary utterance, while writers of the frivolous sort devoted their talent to a lighter and less sincere art than that of the short-storynamely, court-poetry.

There is, of course, one tremendous exception; Homer is the one poet of authentic epic who had sufficient genius to make unfailingly, nobly beautiful poetry within the strict and hard conditions of purely auricular art.

The abstract of Dante, therefore, in these volumes (with every deprecation that becomes me of being supposed to pretend to give a thorough idea of any poetry whatsoever, especially without its metrical form) aspires to be regarded as, at all events, not exhibiting a false idea of the Dantesque spirit in point of feeling and expression.