[9] At this very time, by-the-bye, Hazlitt was lecturing, and Keats, after hearing him, reports to his brother (February 14, 1818), “Hazlitt’s last lecture was on Thomson, Cowper, and Crabbe. He praised Thomson and Cowper, but he gave Crabbe an unmerciful licking.”
[10] We speak thus without forgetting that an American poet once wrote (what a reputable American periodical printed) a revised version of one of the odes, just to show how easily Keats could be improved upon. The good man might have been, though we believe he was not, brother to the one of whom we have all heard, who declared his opinion that there weren’t ten men in Boston who could have written Shakespeare’s plays.
[11] Is there a possible connection between this fact and the further one that really magical lines are seldom or never to be found in the work of the more distinctively musical poets,—say in Coleridge, Shelley, Tennyson, and Swinburne?
[12] According to an eminent French critic, M. de Wyzewa, the United States still has (since Whitman’s death, he means to say) two poets,—Mr. Merril and Mr. Griffin. “Only two” is the critic’s phrase, but the adverb need not disturb us. A busy people who have two poets at once may count themselves rich.
TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES:
Obvious typographical errors have been corrected.
Inconsistencies in hyphenation have been standardized.