Page:A Prospect of Manchester and Its Neighbourhood.djvu/13

Rh poems will sufficiently bear out. I here allude to those poems, purely descriptive of a prospect placed before the poet's eyes: our language contains many fine descriptive poems, where the scenery lived only in the imagination of the author; and this is a very considerable distinction of descriptive poetry.

There are few things in which men differ more, than in their opinions upon poetry: the taste of individuals is confined, and like the genius, it is frequently shewn most strongly, upon particular subjects. A rapid succession of ideas in the mind, and a power of delivering these ideas unimpaired, in words, seems necessary to constitute a poet; and the mind of the poet is as much shewn in painting or sculpture, as in that art, to which the term has been more particularly applied. Poetry has been defined, the art of painting ideas and objects to another, through the medium of language: and it has at one time been thought necessary to constitute poetry, that the words should be formed into an artificial arrangement, termed verse; but of late, the works of Fenelon in France, and the publication of Ossian in