SUMMARY. INVOCATION.-The origin, nature, and perfection of the poetic art.The various sources of poetry.-Silence, Solitude; Young-Dodd-HerveyOssian.--Melancholy; Kirk White-Chatterton-Warton-Smith.- Grief; Shaw-Mason-Gray.-Love; examples-youth-Ovid-Tibullus-Anacreon -Moore-Troubadours.-Wit, comic and satiric poetry; Butler—Syntax— Lucilius-Juvenal-Horace-Boileau-Rochester-Prior-Gay-Swift-Rabe lais. Nature, pastoral and picturesque poetry, &c.; Theocritus-VirgilGessner-Thomson-Burns · Scott-Hogg-Falconer - Goldsmith-Crubbe -Bloomfield — Gisborne-Shenstone -Denham-Somerville-Wordsworth— Montgomery.-Mind; intellectual poetry; Beattie — Rogers — Campbell — Akenside-Collins.-History; epic poetry; Homer-Virgil-Milton-Lucan --Le Trissin-Camouens—Tasso—(Ariosto)—Voltaire. Canto E. GERM of enthusiast Nature, POESY! Thy sources, num'rous as thy varied laws, From which each Poet inspiration draws ; Who Thee have honour'd in the golden line, And who disgrac'd the influence divine, Thoughtful, we trace. How man, with fond desire Inflam'd, or kindled by resistless fire, C 'Gan first to try the "imitative” strain,* To celebrate, in "metre and harmonious verse,' Or HESIOD taught us in his "works and days. To finish'd Ode and splendid Epopee. Is thy sweet power a "taint of madness" hight? So thought sage Plato and the Stagyrite:† *See Aristotle's Poetics. + See Aristotle's Poetics. |