They show the patient
investigator, the close student of history, and the unwearied explorer
of the beauties of predecessors, but they give no assurances of a man
who should add aught to stock of household words, or to the rarer and
more sacred delights of the fireside or the arbor. The earliest
specimens of Shelley's poetic mind already, also, give tokens of that
ethereal sublimation in which the spirit seems to soar above the regions
of words, but leaves its body, the verse, to be entombed, without hope
of resurrection, in a mass of them. Cowley is generally instanced as a
wonder of precocity. But his early insipidities show only a capacity for
rhyming and for the metrical arrangement of certain conventional
combinations of words, a capacity wholly dependent on a delicate
physical organization, and an unhappy memory. An early poem is only
remarkable when it displays an effort of _reason_, and the rudest verses
in which we can trace some conception of the ends of poetry, are worth
all the miracles of smooth juvenile versification. A schoolboy, one
would say, might acquire the regular see-saw of Pope merely by an
association with the motion of the play-ground tilt.
Mr. Poe's early productions show that he could see through the verse to
the spirit beneath, and that he already had a feeling that all the life
and grace of the one must depend on and be modulated by the will of the
other.
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