in nature, to form a proportional estimate of the animals. Whether or not these marks could be readily combined so as to form a vivid image of the animals in the reader's mind, must have been a question about which Virgil was totally indifferent. Except in such cases as these, the detailed delineation of bodily objects, without the Homeric artifice of rendering the coexistent parts actually consecutive, to which I have already alluded, has always been regarded by the best critics as an uninteresting and trifling performance, for which little or no genius is required. When the poetaster feels himself at a loss, he sets to work, as Horace tells us, to delineate a grove, an altar, a rivulet meandering through pleasant meadows, a rapid stream, or perhaps a rainbow:— * Here in labor'd strain A sacred grove, or fair Diana's fane Hor. De Arte Poet., v. 16. When the judgment of Pope had become matured by years and experience, he looked back, we are told, with great contempt on the pictorial essays of his youthful muse. He insisted that it was indispensable for any one who desired to render himself really worthy of the name of a poet to renounce as early as possible the taste for dry delineation, and compared a merely descriptive poem to a feast composed of nothing but sauces.* Of M. Von Kleist I can myself testify that his poem on "Spring" was that which he esteemed the least. Had his life been longer spared, he would have entirely remodelled it. He was, in fact, occupied, before his death, in laying down a plan for this purpose, and meditated on the means by which he might be enabled to reduce to some natural arrangement and consecutive order, the multitude of images which he appeared to have designed almost at random, from the boundless space of renovated nature. He would at the same time have done what Marmontel, no doubt, with reference to his Eclogues, has recommended to the German poets in general; he would have converted a series of images with which sentiments are but sparingly interwoven, into a series of sentiments with but a slight admixture of images. * * See Note 42, end of volume. EIGHTEENTH SECTION. Some Degree of Latitude must be allowed, both to the Poet and the Painter, in interpreting the Limits of their respective Arts. Reflections on the Shields of Achilles and Æneas in Homer and Virgil. And shall we then be told that Homer himself has been guilty of these frigid delineations of bodily objects?—I trust that there are but few passages which can be appealed to in support of such an assertion, and I am convinced that even these few will be found of such a nature as to confirm the rule, to which they may appear at first sight to form exceptions. It may, I presume, be taken for granted, that succession of time is the sphere of the poet, as space is that of the painter. The union of two necessarily distinct points of time in one and the same picture,—as, for instance, when Fra N Mazzuoli represents the Rape of the Sabine women on the same canvass with their reconciliation to their husbands and kindred, or when Titian gives in one piece the whole story of the Prodigal Son, his dissolute life, his misery, and his repentance, is an encroachment made by the painter on the territory of the poet, of which good taste can never approve. In like manner the successive enumeration of several parts, or things, which, if they form a whole, must necessarily be perceived at once in nature, for the purpose of enabling the reader to conceive an idea of the whole, is an encroachment committed on the territory of the painter by the poet, who at the same time commits the folly of lavishing without effect the resources of his imagination. Nevertheless, the mutual relation which exists between poetry and painting may be likened to the rational policy of two neighboring and friendly states, which, while they forbid all unreasonable liberties in the heart of their dominions on the part of each other, yet tacitly permit on their extreme boundaries a sort of mutual indulgence, to compensate on both sides |