["_Quam nihil ad genium Papiniane tuum_," was the motto of _The Lyrical Ballads_.]
That deep intuition of our _one_ness, is it not at the bottom of many of our faults as well as virtues? the dislike that a bad man should have any virtues, a good man any faults? And yet, too, a something noble and incentive is in this.
What comfort in the silent eye upraised to God! "_Thou_ knowest." O! what a thought! Never to be friendless, never to be unintelligible! The omnipresence has been generally represented as a spy, a sort of Bentham's Panopticon.[D] O to feel what the pain is to be utterly unintelligible and then--"O God, thou understandest!"
The question should be fairly stated, how far a man can be an adequate, or even a good (as far as he goes) though inadequate critic of poetry who is not a poet, at least, _in posse_? Can he be an adequate, can he be a good critic, though not commensurate [with the poet criticised]? But there is yet another distinction. Supposing he is not only not a poet, but is a bad poet! What then?
[Sidenote: IMMATURE CRITICS March 16, 1805]
[The] cause of the offence or disgust received by the _mean_ in good poems when we are young, and its diminution and occasional evanescence when we are older in true taste [is] that, at first, we are from various causes delighted with _generalities_ of nature which can all be expressed in dignified words; but, afterwards, becoming more intimately acquainted with Nature in her detail, we are delighted with _distinct_, vivid ideas, and with vivid ideas most when made distinct, and can most often forgive and sometimes be delighted with even a low image from art or low life when it gives you the very thing by an illustration, as, for instance, Cowper's stream "inlaying" the level vale as with silver, and even Shakspere's "shrill-tongued Tapster's answering shallow wits" applied to echoes in an _echofull_ place.
[Sidenote: ATTENTION AND SENSATION March 17, 1805]
Of the not being able to know whether you are smoking in the dark or when your eyes are shut: item, of the ignorance in that state of the difference of beef, veal, &c.--it is all attention. Your ideas being shut, other images arise which you must _attend to_, it being the habit of a _seeing_ man to attend chiefly to _sight_. So close your eyes, (and) you attend to the ideal images, and, attending to them, you abstract your _attention_. It is the same when deeply thinking in a reverie, you no longer hear distinct sound made to you. But what a strange inference that there were no sounds!