Page:Essays and studies; by members of the English Association, volume 1.djvu/148

 nicious ever preached. Men have only to read Virgil, Shakespeare, Milton, Goethe, Keats—in his Odes—any one, indeed, among the army of the greatest poets of the world to realize that true poetry is the most lucid of all the arts, and the most scientifically precise. But the purlieus of Romanticism gave ample scope for vagueness. Simplicity is hard to copy; it produces little effect; and the followers of Wordsworth were few. But the followers of Moore and Byron were many. These were the days of Lines to Cherokees and Odes on the Sentiments of young Indians at Sunrise. It was a time when no imagination was allowed to play upon any subject, and those regions were naturally preferred where fact had erected fewest barriers. There is nothing that cannot be imagined by people of no imagination, and the emotions of coloured races on large natural phenomena admit of any amount of woolly thoughts, facile emotions and false possibilities. Perhaps this is the reason why this era can boast more minor poetesses than any other: no disrespectful remark, since women's largeness, as well as their weakness, is in part, at least, due to their indefiniteness. But it must not be supposed that men were guiltless in this direction. What could be hazier than this from the pen of one, Henry Pickering, a poet not unconsidered in his day. It is headed: To a young invalid, condemned by accidental lameness to perpetual confinement, and this is the consolation offered:

No cripple of any age, however recumbent, could feel anything but annoyance at words so glib and flabby proceed-