Plato and Homer. Plato greatly admired Homer, but excluded him from his ideal republic.
Plato, ’tis true, great Homer doth commend,
Yet from his common-weal did him exile.
Lord Brooke, Inquisition upon Fame, etc. (1554-1628).
Plato and Poets.
Plato, anticipating the Reviewers,
From his “republic,” banished without pity
The poets.
Longfellow, The Poet’s Tale.
Platonic Puritan (The), John Howe, the puritan divine (1630-1706).
Plausible (Counsellor) and Serjeant Eitherside, two pleaders in The Man of the World, by C. Macklin (1764).
Pleasant (Mrs.) in The Parson’s Wedding, by Tom Killigrew (1664).
Pleasures of Hope, a poem in two parts by Thomas Campbell (1799). It opens with a comparison between the beauty of scenery, and the ideal enchantments of fancy, in which hope is never absent, but can sustain the seaman on his watch, the soldier on his march, and Byron in his perilous adventures. The hope of a mother, the hope of a prisoner, the hope of the wanderer, the grand hope of the patriot, the hope of regenerating uncivilized nations, extending liberty, and ameliorating the condition of the poor. Pt. ii. speaks of the hope of love, and the hope of a future state, concluding with the episode of Conrad and Ellenore. Conrad was a felon, transported to New South Wales, but, though “a martyr to his crimes, was true to his daughter.” Soon, he says, he shall return to the dust from which he was taken;
But not, my child, with life’s precarious fire,
The immortal ties of Nature shall expire;
These shall resist the triumph of decay,
When time is o’er, and worlds have passed away.
Cold in the dust this perished heart may lie,
But that which warmed it once shall never die—
That spark, unburied in its mortal frame,
With living light, eternal, and the same,
Shall beam on Joy’s interminable years,
Unveiled by darkness, unassuaged by tears.
Pt. ii.
Pleasures of Imagination, a poem in three books, by Akenside (1744). All the pleasures of imagination arise from the perception of greatness, wonderfulness, or beauty. The beauty of greatness—witness the pleasures of mountain scenery, of astronomy, of infinity. The pleasure of what is wonderful—witness the delight of novelty, of the revelations of science, of tales of fancy. The pleasure of beauty, which is always connected with truth—the beauty of color, shape, and so on, in natural objects; the beauty of mind and the moral faculties. Bk. ii. contemplates accidental pleasures arising from contrivance and design, emotion and passion, such as sorrow, pity, terror, and indignation. Bk. iii. Morbid imagination the parent of vice; the benefits of a well-trained imagination.