Page:The Harvard Classics Vol. 51; Lectures.djvu/271

Rh back to his "incomparable Shakespeare," praises Longinus, and abandons rhyme. In his next period he turns rationalist, and exalts "good sense" and "propriety." In the last dozen years of his life his enthusiasm for highly imaginative literature returns; he translates Juvenal and Virgil, and modernizes Chaucer; he is "lost in admiration over Virgil," though at heart he "prefers Homer." It is in this final stage of his career as a critic that he writes the charming praise of Chaucer, which is reprinted in The Harvard Classics. It is the perfection of essay writing. "Here is God's plenty," as he exclaims of the elder poet, in whom he finds a soul congenial to his own. Dryden did not, it is true, quite understand Chaucer's verse, else he could never have found it "not harmonious," yet he makes royal amends by admitting that "there is the rude sweetness of a Scotch tune in it, which is natural and pleasing, though not perfect." In his earlier "Apology for Heroic Poetry" (1677) he salutes "the deceased author of 'Paradise Lost,' " then three years dead, and calls Milton's masterpiece "one of the greatest, most noble, and most sublime poems which either this age or nation has produced."

WORDSWORTH AND COLERIDGE

Dryden's best pages of criticism tempt one, in brief, to agree with him in declaring that "Poets themselves are the most proper, though I conclude not the only critics." The critical writings of Wordsworth and Coleridge confirm us in that opinion. Wordsworth is less facile than Dryden, and he does not range so far. Coleridge, by natural endowment one of the greatest of literary critics, is desultory and indolent. But the two men, when focusing their masterly powers upon the defense and interpretation of that mode of Romantic poetry in which their own creative energies were for a time absorbed, produced criticism which has affected the whole subsequent development of English literature. Coleridge's lecture on "Poesy or Art," for instance, is full of those flashes of penetrative insight which reveal the born critic: Art "is the power of humanizing nature"; "passion itself imitates order"; "beauty is the union of the shapely with the vital"; "the subjects chosen for works of art should be such as really are capable of being expressed and conveyed within the limits of