Biographia Literaria | Page 6

present subject. Among those with whom I
conversed, there were, of course, very many who had formed their taste,
and their notions of poetry, from the writings of Pope and his followers;
or to speak more generally, in that school of French poetry, condensed
and invigorated by English understanding, which had predominated
from the last century. I was not blind to the merits of this school, yet, as
from inexperience of the world, and consequent want of sympathy with
the general subjects of these poems, they gave me little pleasure, I
doubtless undervalued the kind, and with the presumption of youth
withheld from its masters the legitimate name of poets. I saw that the
excellence of this kind consisted in just and acute observations on men
and manners in an artificial state of society, as its matter and substance;
and in the logic of wit, conveyed in smooth and strong epigrammatic
couplets, as its form: that even when the subject was addressed to the
fancy, or the intellect, as in the Rape of the Lock, or the Essay on Man;
nay, when it was a consecutive narration, as in that astonishing product
of matchless talent and ingenuity Pope's Translation of the Iliad; still a
point was looked for at the end of each second line, and the whole was,
as it were, a sorites, or, if I may exchange a logical for a grammatical
metaphor, a conjunction disjunctive, of epigrams. Meantime the matter
and diction seemed to me characterized not so much by poetic thoughts,
as by thoughts translated into the language of poetry. On this last point,
I had occasion to render my own thoughts gradually more and more
plain to myself, by frequent amicable disputes concerning Darwin's
Botanic Garden, which, for some years, was greatly extolled, not only
by the reading public in general, but even by those, whose genius and
natural robustness of understanding enabled them afterwards to act
foremost in dissipating these "painted mists" that occasionally rise from
the marshes at the foot of Parnassus. During my first Cambridge
vacation, I assisted a friend in a contribution for a literary society in
Devonshire: and in this I remember to have compared Darwin's work to
the Russian palace of ice, glittering, cold and transitory. In the same
essay too, I assigned sundry reasons, chiefly drawn from a comparison
of passages in the Latin poets with the original Greek, from which they
were borrowed, for the preference of Collins's odes to those of Gray;
and of the simile in Shakespeare

How like a younker or a prodigal The scarfed bark puts from her native
bay, Hugg'd and embraced by the strumpet wind! How like the prodigal
doth she return, With over-weather'd ribs and ragged sails, Lean, rent,
and beggar'd by the strumpet wind! (Merch. of Ven. Act II. sc. 6.)
to the imitation in the Bard;
Fair laughs the morn, and soft the zephyr blows While proudly riding
o'er the azure realm In gallant trim the gilded vessel goes, Youth at the
prow and pleasure at the helm; Regardless of the sweeping whirlwind's
sway, That hush'd in grim repose, expects it's evening prey.
(in which, by the bye, the words "realm" and "sway" are rhymes dearly
purchased)--I preferred the original on the ground, that in the imitation
it depended wholly on the compositor's putting, or not putting, a small
capital, both in this, and in many other passages of the same poet,
whether the words should be personifications, or mere abstractions. I
mention this, because, in referring various lines in Gray to their original
in Shakespeare and Milton, and in the clear perception how completely
all the propriety was lost in the transfer, I was, at that early period, led
to a conjecture, which, many years afterwards was recalled to me from
the same thought having been started in conversation, but far more ably,
and developed more fully, by Mr. Wordsworth;--namely, that this style
of poetry, which I have characterized above, as translations of prose
thoughts into poetic language, had been kept up by, if it did not wholly
arise from, the custom of writing Latin verses, and the great importance
attached to these exercises, in our public schools. Whatever might have
been the case in the fifteenth century, when the use of the Latin tongue
was so general among learned men, that Erasmus is said to have
forgotten his native language; yet in the present day it is not to be
supposed, that a youth can think in Latin, or that he can have any other
reliance on the force or fitness of his phrases, but the authority of the
writer from whom he has adopted them. Consequently he must first
prepare his thoughts, and then pick out, from Virgil, Horace, Ovid, or
perhaps more compendiously from his