[55]. “En lisant un poëme, nous regardons les instructions que nous y pouvons prendre comme l’accessoire. L’importante c’est le style, parceque c’est du style d’un poëme que dépend le plaisir de son lecteur.”—I. 303.
[56]. In the fourteenth chapter of Biographia Literaria. He has conceded the convenience of calling all compositions that have “this charm superadded”—rhythm and rime—by the name of poem.
[57]. Essays, Edinburgh, 1776, p. 296. “I am of opinion,” he says, pp. 294 f., On Poetry and Music, “that to poetry, verse is not essential. In a prose work we may have the fable, the arrangement, and a great deal of the pathos and language of poetry; and such a work is certainly a poem, though”—note the concession—“perhaps not a perfect one.” Verse “is necessary to the perfection of all poetry that admits of it,”—and how, pray, is that limitation to be adjusted? “Verse is to poetry what colours are to painting;” and, quoting Aristotle, “versification is to poetry what bloom is to the human countenance.” Here are pribbles and prabbles enough.
[58]. Poetry and Imagination.
[59]. Works, ed. 1854, III. 309.
[60]. As preface to his Lectures on the English Poets.
[61]. M. E. M. de Vogüé has other views. To him Robinson Crusoe is “un bon traité de psychologie historique sur un peuple,”—an historic psychology of the English race.—Histoire et Poésie, p. 194.
[62]. Works, Hartford, 1889, I. 213 f. Essay on Wordsworth, etc. Bruchmann, in his excellent Poetik, Berlin, 1898, gives up the attempt to mark off poetry from prose, speaks of a “neutral ground,” and then defines poetry as “Steigerung durch Form und Inhalt; die Form ist Gesang, Rhythmus, Reim” (p. 53). What more could the defender of rhythm ask as working test?
[63]. When only one-and-twenty. Meditationes Philosophicae de Nonnullis ad Poema Pertinentibus, 1735.
[64]. Jugendschriften F. Schl., ed. Minor, I. 99; a study of Greek poetry.