I’ll drink Pierian puddle dry.
Pursuant to Mr Pope’s advice;
“Drink deep, or taste not the Pierian spring.”
Sent me a bag full of his gas.
This wondrous soul-transporting modification of matter is christened by chymists gaseous oxyd of nitrogen, and, as will be evident, from the following sublime stanzas, and my judicious comments thereon (in which I hold the microscope of criticism to those my peculiar beauties which are not visible to the naked eye of common sense) is a subject worthy the serious attention of the poet and physiologist.
Any “half-formed witling,” as Pope says (Essay on Criticism) “may hammer crude conceptions into a sort of measured nonsense, vulgarly called prose bewitched.” But the daring mortal, who aspires to “build with lofty rhyme” an Ævi Monumentum, before he sets about the mighty enterprise, must be filled with a sort of incomprehensible quiddam of divine inflation. Then, if he can keep clear of Bedlam, and be allowed the use of pen, ink, and paper, every line he scribbles, and every phrase he utters, will be a miracle of sublimity. Thus one Miss Sibyl remained stupid as a barber’s block, till overpowered by the overbearing influence of Phœbus. But when
——————ea fræna furenti
Concutit, et stimulos sub pectore vertit Apollo,
the frantic gipsy muttered responses at once sublime, prophetic, and unintelligible.
Indeed, this furor mentis, so necessary an ingredient in the composition of the genuine poet, sometimes terminates in real madness, as was unfortunately the case with Collins and Smart: Swift, Johnson, and Cowper, were not without dismal apprehensions of a similar fate. The wight, therefore, who wishes to secure to himself a sublunary immortality by dint of poetizing, and happens not to be poeta nascitur, must, like Doctor Caustic, in the present instance, seek a sort of cow-pock-like substitute for that legitimate rabies, which characterizes the true sons of Apollo.