At least I have found that where the subject is taken immediately from
the author's personal sensations and experiences, the excellence of
a particular poem is but an equivocal mark, and often a fallacious
pledge, of genuine poetic power. We may perhaps remember the tale of
the statuary, who had acquired considerable reputation for the legs
of his goddesses, though the rest of the statue accorded but
indifferently with ideal beauty; till his wife, elated by her husband's
praises, modestly acknowledged that she herself had been his constant
model. In the _Venus and Adonis_ this proof of poetic power exists
even to excess. It is throughout as if a superior spirit, more
intuitive, more intimately conscious even than the characters
themselves, not only of every outward look and act, but of the flux
and reflux of the mind in all its subtlest thoughts and feelings, were
placing the whole before our view; himself meanwhile unparticipating
in the passions, and actuated only by that pleasurable excitement which
had resulted from the energetic fervour of his own spirit, in so vividly
exhibiting what it had so accurately and profoundly contemplated.
Pages:
303
304
305
306
307
308
309
310
311
312
313
314
315
316
317
318
319
320
321
322
323
324
325
326
327