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He could songes make, and wel endite. -CHAUCER, GEOFFREY, 1387-93? Canterbury Tales.

Having bene in all ages, and even amongst the most barbarous, always of singular accounpt and honour, and being indede so worthy and commendable an arte; or rather no arte, but a divine gift and heavenly instinct not to bee gotten by laboure and learning, but adorned with both; and poured into the witte by a certain 'Evbovσopós and cellestial inspiration.-SPENSER, EDMUND, 1579, The Shepherd's Calendar, Argument, Oct.

Nature never let forth the earth in so rich tapistry, as divers Poets have done, neither with pleasant rivers, fruitful trees, sweet smelling flowers: nor whatsoever els may make the too much loved earth more lovely. Her world is brasen, the Poets only deliver a golden.-SIDNEY, SIR PHILIP, 1595, An Apologie for Poetrie. I had rather be a kitten, and cry-mew, Than one of these same metre balladmongers;

I had rather hear a brazen canstick turn'd,
Or a dry wheel grate on an axle-tree;
And that would set my teeth nothing on
edge,

Nothing so much as mincing poetry;

'Tis like the forc'd gait of a shuffling nag. -SHAKESPEARE, WILLIAM, 1596-97, King Henry IV., Part I, Act iii, Sc. i.

When Heav'n would strive to do the best it can,

And puts an Angel's Spirit into a Man, The utmost power in that great work doth spend

When to the World a Poet it doth intend.

A verse may finde him who a sermon flies And turn delight into a sacrifice. -HERBERT, GEORGE, 1633, The Temple, Church Porch.

Lift not thy spear against the Muses' bower: The great Emathian conqueror bid spare The house of Pindarus, when temple and tower

Went to the ground; and the repeated air Of sad Electra's poet had the power

To save the Athenian walls from ruin bare. -MILTON, JOHN, 1642, When the Assault was intended to the City.

For rhyme the rudder is of verses,
With which, like ships, they steer their

courses.

—BUTLER, SAMUEL, 1663, Hudibras.

the fate of verses, always prized With admiration, or as much despised; Men will be less indulgent to their faults, And patience have to cultivate their thoughts, Poets lose half the praise they should have got, Could it be known what they discreetly blot; Finding new words, that to the ravished ear May like the language of the gods appear, Such as, of old, wise bards employed, to make Unpolished men their wild retreats forsake; Law-giving heroes, famed for taming brutes, And raising cities, with their charming lutes; For rudest minds with harmony were caught, And civil life was by the Muses taught.

-WALLER, EDMUND, 1670, Upon the Earl of Roscommon's Translation of Horace “de Arte Poetica."

Fame from science, not from fortune, draws.
So poetry, which is in Oxford made
An art, in London only is a trade.
There haughty dunces, whose unlearned pen
Could ne'er spell grammar, would be read-
ing men.

Such build their poems the Lucretian way;
So many huddled atoms make a play;
And if they hit in order by some chance,
They call that nature which is ignorance.

It was ever thought to have some participation of divineness, because it doth raise and erect the mind, by submitting the shews of things to the desires of the mind.-BACON, FRANCIS LORD, 1605, Advancement of Learning, bk. ii.

University of Oxford.

True Poets are the Guardians of a State, And, when they fail, portend approaching Fate.

For that which Rome to conquest did inspire, Was not the Vestal, but the Muses' fire. -ROSCOMMON, EARL OF, 1684, An Essay on Translated Verse.

If he have a poetic vein, 'tis to me the strangest thing in the world that the father should desire or suffer it to be cherished or improved. Methinks the parents should labour to have it stifled and suppressed as much as may be; and I know not what reason a father can have to wish his son a poet, who does not desire to have him bid defiance to all other callings and business; which is not yet the worst of the case; for if he proves a successful rhymer, and gets once the reputation of a wit, I desire. it may be considered what company and places he is like to spend his time in,nay, and estate too. Poetry and gaming, which usually go together, are alike in this too, that they seldom bring any advantage but to those who have nothing else to live on. .. If therefore you would not have your son the fiddle to every jovial company, without whom the sparks could not relish their wine nor know how to pass an afternoon idly; if you would not have him to waste his time and estates to divert others, and contemn the dirty acres left him by his ancestors,-I do not think you will much care he should be a poet, or that his schoolmaster should enter him in versifying.-LOCKE, JOHN, 1693, Some Thoughts concerning Education.

True ease in writing comes from art, not chance,

As those move easiest who have learned to dance.

'Tis not enough no harshness gives offence, The sound must seem an echo to the sense, Soft is the strain when zephyr gently blows, And the smooth stream in smoother numbers flows;

But when loud surges lash the sounding shore,

The hoarse rough verse should like the torrent roar:

When Ajax strives some rock's vast weight to throw,

The line too labors, and the words move slow: Not so, when swift Camilla scours the plain, Flies o'er th' unbending corn, and skims along the main.

-POPE, ALEXANDER, 1711, Essay on
Criticism, pt. ii, v. 162-173.

True poets can depress and raise,
Are lords of infamy and praise;
They are not scurrilous in satire,

Nor will in panegyric flatter, Unjustly poets we asperse; Truth shines the brighter clad in verse, And all the fictions they pursue Do but insinuate what is true. -SWIFT, JONATHAN, 1720, To Stella.

Rhymes are difficult things-they are stubborn things, sir.-FIELDING, HENRY, 1751, Amelia.

The bard, nor think too lightly that I mean Those little, piddling witlings, who o'erween Of their small parts, the Murphys of the stage,

The Masons and the Whiteheads of the age, Who all in raptures their own works rehearse,

And drawl out measured prose, which they call verse.

-CHURCHILL, CHARLES, 1764, Independ

ence.

The essence of poetry is invention; such invention as, by producing something unexpected, surprises and delights.—JOHNSON, SAMUEL, 1779, Waller, Lives of the Poets.

There is a pleasure in poetic pains,
Which only poets know.

-COWPER, WILLIAM, 1785, The Task, bk. ii, v. 285-286.

Not mine the soul that pants not after fameAmbitious of a poet's envied name,

I haunt the sacred fount, athirst to prove The grateful influence of the stream I love. -Gifford, WILLIAM, 1791, The Baviad.

The poet must be alike polished by an intercourse with the world as with the studies of taste; one to whom labour is negligence, refinement a science, and art a nature.-DISRAELI, ISAAC, 1796-1818, Vers de Société, Literary Character of Men of Genius.

Call it not vain:-they do not err,
Who say that when the poet dies
Mute Nature mourns her worshipper
And celebrates his obsequies;
Who say tall cliff and cavern lone
For the departed bard makes moan;
That mountains weep in crystal rill;
That flowers in tears of balm distil;
Through his loved groves that breezes sigh,
And oaks in deeper groan reply,
And rivers teach their rushing wave
To murmur dirges round his grave.

-SCOTT, SIR WALTER, 1805, Lay of the
Last Minstrel, Canto v, St. i.

Sweet are the pleasures that to verse belong, And doubly sweet a brotherhood in song. -KEATS, JOHN, 1815, Epistle to George Felton Mathews.

Poetry is the blossom and the fragrance of all human knowledge, human thoughts, human passions, emotions, language.COLERIDGE, SAMUEL TAYLOR, 1817, Biographia Literaria, ch. xv.

What must a Muse of strength, of force, of fire,

In the true Poet's ample mind inspire?
What must he feel, who can the soul express,
Of saint or hero?-he must be no less.
Nor less of evil minds he knows the pain,
But quickly lost the anguish and the stain;
While with the wisest, happiest, purest, best,
His soul assimilates and loves to rest.
-CRABBE, GEORGE, 1819, Tales of the
Hall, bk. vi, note.

Poetry is found to have a few stronger conceptions, by which it would affect or overwhelm the mind, than those in which it presents the moving and speaking image of the departed dead to the senses of the living.-WEBSTER, DANIEL, 1820, Discourse Delivered at Plymouth on the 22nd of December.

Poetry is not like reasoning, a power to be exerted according to the determination of the will. A man cannot say, "I will compose poetry." The greatest poet even cannot say it; for the mind in creation is as a fading coal, which some invisible influence, like an inconstant wind, awakens to transitory brightness; this power arises from within, like the colour of a flower which fades and changes as it is developed, and the conscious portions of our nature are unprophetic either of its approach or its departure. Poetry

is the record of the best and happiest moments of the happiest and best minds. We are aware of evanescent visitations of thought and feeling, sometimes associated with place or person, sometimes regarding our own mind alone, and always arising unforseen and departing unbidden, but elevating and delightful beyond all expression: so that even in the desire and the regret

they leave, there cannot but be pleasure, participating as it does in the nature of its object. It is, as it were, the interpenetration of a diviner nature through our own; but its footsteps are like those of a wind over the sea, which the morning calm erases, and whose traces remain only, as on the wrinkled sand which paves it.SHELLEY, PERCY BYSSHE, 1821, A Defence of Poetry.

Poetry produces an illusion on the eye of the mind, as a magic lantern produces an illusion on the eye of the body. And, as a magic lantern acts best in a dark room, poetry effects its purpose most completely in a dark age. As the light of knowledge breaks in upon its exhibitions, as the outlines of certainty become more and more definite, and the shades of probability more and more distinct, the hues and lineaments of the phantoms which it calls up grow fainter and fainter. We cannot unite the incompatible advantages of reality and deception, the clear discernment of truth and the exquisite enjoyment of fiction. -MACAULAY, THOMAS BABINGTON, 1825, Milton, Edinburgh Review; Critical and Miscellaneous Essays.

The poet, we cannot but think, can never have far to seek for a subject: the elements of his art are in him and around him on every hand; for him the ideal world is not remote from the actual, but under it and within it; nay, he is a poet, precisely because he can discern it there. Wherever there is a sky above him, and a world around him, the poet is in his place, for here too is man's existence, with its definite longings and small acquirings; its ever-thwarted, ever-renewed endeavors; its unspeakable aspirations, its fears and hopes that wander through eternity; and all the mystery of brightness and of gloom that it was ever made of, in any age or climate, since man first began to live. Is there not the fifth act of a tragedy in every death-bed, though it were a peasant's and a bed of heath? And are wooings

and weddings obsolete, that there can be comedy no longer? Or are men suddenly grown wise, that Laughter must no longer shake his sides, but be cheated of his farce? Man's life and nature is as it was, and as it will ever be. But the poet must have an eye to read these things, and heart to understand them, or they come and pass away before him in vain. He is a vates, a seer; a gift of vision that has been given him. Has life no meanings for him which another cannot equally decipher? Then he is no poet, and Delphi itself will not make him one.-CARLYLE, THOMAS, 1828, The Life of Robert Burns. The poet in a golden clime was born, With golden stars above;

Dower'd with the hate of hate, the scorn of scorn,

He utters in his solitude shall move

Men like a swift wind-that tho' dead and gone,

New eyes shall glisten when his beauteous dream

Of love come true in happier frames than his. -BROWNING, ROBERT, 1833, Pauline. Poetry is itself a thing of God;

He made his prophets poets; and the more We feel of poesie do we become

Like God in love and power,-under-makers. -BAILEY, PHILIP JAMES, 1839, Festus, Proem.

these were poets true,
Who did for Beauty as martyrs do

For Truth-the ends being scarcely two.
God's prophets of the Beautiful
These poets were; of iron rule,
The rugged cilix, serge of wool.
-BROWNING, ELIZABETH BARRETT, 1844,
A Vision of Poets.

Poetry is the breath of beauty, flowing around the spiritual world, as the winds that wake up the flowers do about the material. HUNT, LEIGH, 1844, Of Statesmen Who have Written Verses; Men, "omen and Books.

Blessings be with them-and eternal praise, Who gave us nobler loves, and nobler caresThe Poets, who on earth have made us heirs Of truth and pure delight by heavenly lays! -WORDSWORTH, WILLIAM, 1846, Personal Talk.

All that is best in the great poets of all countries is not what is national in them, but what is universal.-LONGFELLOW, HENRY WADSWORTH, 1849, Kavanagh, ch. XX.

One more royal trait properly belongs to the poet. I mean his cheerfulness, without which no man can be a poet,—for beauty is his aim. He loves virtue, not for its obligation, but for its grace; he delights in the world, in man, in woman, for the lovely light that sparkles from them. Beauty, the spirit of joy and hilarity, he sheds over the universe.-EMERSON, RALPH WALDO, 1850, Shakespeare; or the Poet.