Page:The poetical works of Leigh Hunt, containing many pieces now first collected 1849.djvu/12

 Charles Cowden Clarke. The mode of treatment still remains rather material than spiritual. He would venture to prefer, for instance, that of the military procession in "Captain Sword and Captain Pen" to the handling of the same point in the "Story of Rimini." But he could not make alterations to such an extent without writing the whole over again; and though he considers Darwin to have been absurd, when he identified poetry with picture, he regards it as a sin of another extreme against the poet's privilege of universality, to dispute his right to the more tangible imagery of the painter. The descriptions, though long, of that procession, and of the forest, and garden, appear to him to have a certain analogy with the luxury of the South, and at once to heighten and alleviate the catastrophe. If the reader be fatigued with them, he gives himself up to his rebuke. If not, he hopes he shall be defended against more formal objections, on the authority of the critic who said, that every kind of writing was a proper kind, "except the tiresome."

The reader of the "Feast of the Poets" will be good enough to bear in mind, that it was first written a long time ago, never contained all the names that had a right to be in it, and therefore still less professes to contain them now. The Author would have written a new one, on purpose to introduce them, especially Mr. Knowles and his brother dramatists; but the truth is, that these are delicate matters for contemporaries to meddle with; and a young writer will find in after years that he had