"Criticism" - читать интересную книгу автора (Poe Edgar Allan)

Heard but the heavenly strains
That filled the lonely dwelling-

and thus described-

The Fairy's frame was slight, yon fibrous cloud
That catches but the faintest tinge of even,
And which the straining eye can hardly seize
When melting into eastern twilight's shadow,
Were scarce so thin, so slight; but the fair star
That gems the glittering coronet of morn,
Sheds not a light so mild, so powerful,
As that which, bursting from the Fairy's form,
Spread a purpureal halo round the scene,
Yet with an undulating motion,
Swayed to her outline gracefully.

In these exquisite lines the Faculty of mere Comparison is but
little exercised- that of Ideality in a wonderful degree. It is
probable that in a similar case the poet we are now reviewing would
have formed the face of the Fairy of the "fibrous cloud," her arms
of the "pale tinge of even," her eyes of the "fair stars," and her
body of the "twilight shadow." Having so done, his admirers would have
congratulated him upon his imagination, not, taking the trouble to
think that they themselves could at any moment imagine a Fairy of
materials equally as good, and conveying an equally distinct idea.
Their mistake would be precisely analogous to that of many a schoolboy
who admires the imagination displayed in Jack the Giant-Killer, and is
finally rejoiced at; discovering his own imagination to surpass that
of the author, since the monsters destroyed by Jack are only about
forty feet in height, and he himself has no trouble in imagining
some of one hundred and forty. It will, be seen that the Fairy of
Shelley is not a mere compound of incongruous natural objects,
inartificially put together, and unaccompanied by any moral sentiment-
but a being, in the illustration of whose nature some physical
elements are used collaterally as adjuncts, while the main
conception springs immediately or thus apparently springs, from the
brain of the poet, enveloped in the moral sentiments of grace, of
color, of motion- of the beautiful, of the mystical, of the august- in
short of the ideal.*

* Among things, which not only in our opinion, but in the opinion of
far wiser and better men, are to be ranked with the mere
prettinesses of the Muse, are the positive similes so abundant in
the writing of antiquity, and so much insisted upon by the critics
of the reign of Queen Anne.

It is by no means our intention to deny that in the Culprit Fay
are passages of a different order from those to which we have
objected- passages evincing a degree of imagination not to be