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...invention of music, then for the application of its laws to language, and, that done, of what subjects would the poets avail themselves? There would be love and war, or, if no deeds worth celebrating offered themselves (unhappily Horace's saying is sometimes reversed, and heroic men as often fail to the bard as the bard to them), there would only be love. I merely put the case as a comment on the assertion we sometimes hear that if we have no poetry it is the fault of the poets, since the material always abundantly exists in human nature. Undoubtedly...
...altitudo, where his muse is indeed a muse of fire, that can ascend, if not to the highest heaven of invention, yet to the supremest height of impersonal utterance. Then, like Elias, the prophet, "he stands up as fire, and his word burns like a lamp." But too often, when left to his own resources, and to the conscientious performance of the duty laid upon him to be a great poet quand meme, he seems diligently intent on producing fire by the primitive method of rubbing the dry sticks of his blank verse one against the other, while we stand...
Even as a teacher he is often too much of a pedagogue, and is apt to forget that poetry instructs not by precept and inculcation, but by hints and indirections and suggestions, by inducing a mood rather than by enforcing a principle or a moral. He sometimes impresses our fancy with the image of a schoolmaster whose class-room commands an unrivalled prospect of cloud and mountain, of all the pomp and prodigality of heaven and earth. From time to time he calls his pupils to the window, and makes them see what, without the finer intuition of his eyes...
...fully justified, and which I never could help sorrowfully applying to a writer of our own day, Mr. Browning. Style is that expression of a just thought in prose, or of a thought infused with imaginative passion in poetry, which is precisely adequate-neither more nor less. I have often thought that a happy image of it is an Italian girl with a jar of water on her head. The necessity of an exact balance gives dignity and something which may almost be called repose, to every motion. If the jar be of classical outline, as it often...
This seems to us to be the situation: That such plays are powerful stimulants to the study of the dead languages, but that they would lose their force if applied too often. There might, however, well be a Greek and a Latin Play in every four years, so that both might be seen by each college generation...