For the public this may well be enough, nay, more than enough; but for the critic even this is not yet quite enough.
I speak of poetic genius as employing itself upon narrative or dramatic poetry,—poetry in which the poet has to go out of himself and to create. In lyrical poetry, in the direct expression of personal feeling, the most subtle genius may, under the momentary pressure of passion, express itself simply. Even here, however, the native tendency will generally be discernible.
‘And I have endured—the like whereof no soul upon the earth hath yet endured—to carry to my lips the hand of him who slew my child’.—_Iliad_, xxiv. 505.
‘Nay and thou too, old man, in times past wert, as we hear, happy’.—_Iliad_, xxiv. 543. In the original this line, for mingled pathos and dignity, is perhaps without a rival even in Homer.
’For so have the gods spun our destiny to us wretched mortals,—that we should live in sorrow; but they themselves are without trouble’.—_Iliad_, xxiv. 525.
‘_I_ wept not: so of stone grew I within:—_they_ wept’.—_Hell_, xxxiii. 49 (Carlyle’s Translation, slightly altered).
○ Footnotes have been moved to follow the chapters in which they are referenced.