Page:Fugitive Poetry 1600-1878.djvu/19



" great tendency of poetry," writes Channing, "is to carry the mind beyond and above the beaten, dusty, weary walks of ordinary life, to lift it into a purer element, and to breathe into it more profound and generous emotion. It reveals to us the loveliness of Nature, brings back the freshness of youthful feeling, revives the relish of simple pleasures, keeps unquenched the enthusiasm which warmed the springtime of our being, strengthens our interest in human nature by vivid delineations of its tenderest and loftiest feelings, knits us by new ties with universal being, and, through the brightness of its prophetic visions, helps faith to lay hold on the future life." And says Gray in his Life of Robert Ferguson, "Works of philosophy and science are only the study of a few superior minds, but the productions of imagination are perused by men of every description. The learned and the ignorant, the grave and the gay, the young and the old, find something attractive in the varied pages of the inspired bard. Hence is the tendency of such effusions of the utmost importance in forming the taste, and cultivating the moral perceptions, especially of the youthful mind. An heroic spirit has been roused by a patriotic song, a hard and proud mind softened to sympathy by a powerful representation of fictitious distress. The distant wanderer, restored to his native scenes by a lively description, has blessed the poet's pen; the solitary thoughts of the invalid have been transported to green fields and cooling streams, and his languid ear charmed with the woodland song; even the pious soul is awakened to a more exalted feeling of devotion by the divine strains of the inspired minstrel."

While we read and realise the truthfulness of the above, we may well say, with Campbell—