For this
glittering masterpiece,--a congenial commentary on which would have
illuminated the literary atmosphere of England,--Mr. Carlyle had no
word; no word for Shelley, no word for Coleridge, no word for
Wordsworth. For Keats he had a word in the paper on Burns, and here it
is: "Poetry, except in such cases as that of Keats, where the whole
consists in a weak-eyed, maudlin sensibility and a certain vague,
random timefulness of nature, is no separate faculty." A parenthesis,
short and contemptuous, is all he gives to one of whom it has been
truly said, that of no poet who has lived, not of Shakespeare, is the
poetry written before the twenty-fifth year so good as his; and of
whom it may as truly be said, that his best poems need no apology in
the youthfulness of their author; but that for originality, power,
variety, feeling, thoughtfulness, melody, they take rank in the first
class of the poetry of the world. Is not Thomas Carlyle justly
chargeable with having committed a high literary misdemeanor? Nay,
considering his gift of poetic insight, and with it his persistent
ignoring of the great English poets of his age, considering the warm
solicitation on the one side, and the duty on the other, his
offense may be termed a literary crime.
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