Society, by degrees, is constructed into a machine that carries us
safely and insipidly from one end of life to the other, in a very
comfortable prose style:
Obscurity her curtain round them drew,
And siren Sloth a dull quietus sung.
The remarks which have been here made, would, in some measure, lead
to a solution of the question of the comparative merits of painting
and poetry. I do not mean to give any preference, but it should seem
that the argument which has been sometimes set up, that painting must
affect the imagination more strongly, because it represents the image
more distinctly, is not well founded. We may assume without much
temerity that poetry is more poetical than painting. When artists or
connoisseurs talk on stilts about the poetry of painting, they show
that they know little about poetry, and have little love for the art.
Painting gives the object itself; poetry what it implies. Painting
embodies what a thing contains in itself; poetry suggests what exists
out of it, in any manner connected with it. But this last is the proper
province of the imagination.
Pages:
332
333
334
335
336
337
338
339
340
341
342
343
344
345
346
347
348
349
350
351
352
353
354
355
356