The works of Horace : with English notes, critical and ... - Cristo Raul

Xlii LIFE OF HOKACE.
period. It mast make for itself a foreign realm in the past or in the
future. At all events, it must have recourse to some remote or ex-
the calm course of every-day events can afr
traordinary excitement ;
ford no subject of nspiration ; the decencies and conventional pro-
prieties of civilized life lie upon it as a deadening spell; the assim-
ilating and levelling tone of manners smooths away all which is
striking or sublime.
But may there not be a poetry of the most civilized and highlycultivated
state of human society; something equable, tranquil,
serene ; affording delight by its wisdom and truth, by its grace and
elegance ? Human nature in all its forms is the domain of poetry,
^nd though the imagination may have to perform a different office,
and to exercise a more limited authority, yet it can not be thought,
or, rather, can not be feared, that it will ever be so completely ex-
tinguished in the mind of man as to leave us nothing but the everyday
world in its cold and barren reality.
Poetry, indeed, which thrills and melts ; which stirs the very depths
of the heart and soul ; which creates, or stretches its reanimating
.w.and over the past, the distant, the unseen, may be, and no doubt
is, a very different production of the wonderful mechanism of the
human mind from that which has only the impressive language and
the harmonious expression, without the fiction of poetry ; but human
life, even in. its calmest form, will still delight in seeing itself re-
flected in the pure mirror of poetry ; and poetry has too much real
dignity, too much genuine sympathy with universal human nature
to condescend to be exclusive. There Is room enough on the broad
heights of Helicon, at least on its many peaks, for Homer and Menan
der, for Virgil and Horace, for Shakspeare, and Pope, and Covppev.
May we not pass, without supposing that we ai-e abandoning the
sacred precincts of the Muses, from the death of Dido to the epistle
to Augustus ? Without asserting that any thing like a regular cycle
brings round the taste for a particular style of composition, or that
the demand of the human mind (more poetic readers must not be
shocked by this adoption of the. -language of political economy) re-
quires, and is still further stimulated by the supply of a particular
kind of production at particular periods ; it may be said, in general,
that poetry begets prose, and prose poetry— ^that is to say, wheu
poetry has long occupied itself solely with more imaginative subjects,
when it has been exclusively fictitious and altogether remote from
the ordinary affairs of life, there arises a desire for greater truth
for a more close copy of that which actually exists around us. Good
sense, keen observation, terse expression, polished harmony, then
command and delight, and possess, perhaps in their turn too exclu-
sively, for some time, the public ear. But directly this familiarity
with common life has too closely approximated poetry to prose
when it is undistinguished, or merely distinguished from prose b^ a
conventional poetic language, or certain regular forms of verse
then the poetic spirit bursts away again into freedom ; and, in o-en-