"
All this seems anticipated, and, as it were, coiled up in the words
of our poet:--
"Mind, mind alone (bear witness earth and heaven!)
The living fountains in itself contains
Of beauteous and sublime."
That Akenside was a real poet many expressions in his "Pleasures of
Imagination" prove, such as that just quoted--
"Yoked with whirlwinds and the northern blast
Sweeps the long tract of day;"
but, taking his poem as a whole, it is rather a tissue of eloquence
and philosophical declamation than of imagination. He deals rather
in sheet lightning than in forked flashes. As a didactic poem it has
a high, but not the highest place. It must not be named beside the
"De Rerum Natura" of Lucretius, or the "Georgics" of Virgil, or the
"Night Thoughts" of Young; and in poetry, yields even to the
"Queen Mab" of Shelley. It ranks high, however, amongst that fine
class of works which have called themselves, by no misnomer,
"Pleasures;" and to recount all the names of which were to give an
"enumeration of sweets" as delightful as that in "Don Juan." How
cheering to think of that beautiful bead-roll--of which the
"Pleasures of Memory," "Pleasures of Hope," "Pleasures of Melancholy,"
"Pleasures of Imagination," are only a few! We may class, too, with
them, Addison's essays on the "Pleasures of Imagination" in _The
Spectator_, which, although in prose, glow throughout with the
mildest and truest spirit of poetry; and if inferior to Akenside in
richness and swelling pomp of words, and in dashing rhetorical force,
far excel him in clearness, in chastened beauty, and in those
inimitable touches and unconscious felicities of thought and
expression which drop down, like ripe apples falling suddenly across
your path from a laden bough, and which could only have proceeded
from Addison's exquisite genius.
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