Which from the Alps its headlong Deluge pours,
And foams, and thunders o’er the Vales below,
With desultory fury borne along,
Rolls his impetuous, vast, unfathomable song. West.
I know not, my Lord, how it happens, that we generally find ourselves more highly pleased with excess and inequality in poetic composition, than with the serene, the placid, and the regular progression of a corrected imagination. Is it because the mind is satiated with uniformity of any kind, and that remarkable blemishes, like a few barren fields interspersed in a landschape give additional lustre to the more cultivated scenery? Or does it proceed from a propensity in human nature to be pleased, when we observe a great Genius sometimes sinking as far below the common level, as at others, he is capable of rising above it? I confess, that I am inclined to deduce this feeling more frequently from the former than from the latter of these causes; though I am afraid that the warmest benevolence will hardly prevail upon your Lordship not to attribute it in some instances to a mixture of both.
Whatever may be in this, it is certain that the Odes of Horace, in which he has professedly imitated Pindar, are much more correct and faultless than these of his Master. It would, perhaps, be saying too much, to affirm with some Critics, that the judgment of the Roman Poet was superior to that of his Rival; but it is obvious, that the operation of this Faculty is more remarkable in
his writings, because his imagination was more ductile and pliable. —Upon the whole, therefore, we shall not do injustice to these two great men, if we assign to their works the same degree of comparative excellence, which the Italians ascribe to the pieces of Dominichino and Guido. The former was a great but an unequal Genius; while the more corrected performances of the latter were animated by the Graces, and touched by the pencil of Elegance[97].
I am afraid, that your Lordship is now thinking it high time to bring the whole of this detail to a period.—— Upon reviewing the observations made on the Lyric Poetry of the Ancients through the preceding part of this Essay,
you will find that the subject has been considered under the three following heads. In the first part I have attempted to lay before your Lordship, the state of Lyric Poetry in the earliest ages, as it appears from what we can collect either of the character of the writings of Amphion, Linus, Orpheus, Museus, and Hesiod. In the course of this enquiry I have had occasion to assign the causes, whose concurrence rendered this branch of the poetic Art less perfect at its first introduction than any of the other species. —Upon advancing a little further, a richer and more diversified prospect opened to the imagination. In the first dawn of this more enlightened period, we meet with the names of Alcaeus and Sappho, who, without altering the original character of the Ode, made a considerable change on the subjects to which it was appropriated; and in the full meridian of Science, we find this second form of Lyric Poetry brought to its highest perfection in the writings of Horace. —Some remarks on the nature of those beauties which are peculiarly characteristic of the higher species of the Ode, and on the part which Imagination particularly claims in its composition, led me to mention, a few rules, the exact observation of which will, perhaps, contribute to render this species of poetry more correct and regular, without retrenching any part of its discriminating beauties, and without straitning too much the Genius of the Poet. With this view I
have endeavoured to characterize impartially the pindaric manner, by pointing out its excellencies, by enumerating its defects, and by enquiring from what particular causes the latter are to be deduced.