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objectionable in the retired closet of a diary, and in the sober raiment
of prose. They do not clutch hold of the memory with the drowning
pertinacity of Watts; neither have they the interest of his occasional
simple, lucky beauty. Burns having fortunately been rescued by his
humble station from the contaminating society of the "Best models,"
wrote well and naturally from the first. Had he been unfortunate enough
to have had an educated taste, we should have had a series of poems from
which, as from his letters, we could sift here and there a kernel from
the mass of chaff. Coleridge's youthful efforts give no promise whatever
of that poetical genius which produced at once the wildest, tenderest,
most original and most purely imaginative poems of modern times. Byron's
"Hours of Idleness" would never find a reader except from an intrepid
and indefatigable curiosity. In Wordsworth's first preludings there
is but a dim foreboding of the creator of an era. From Southey's early
poems, a safer augury might have been drawn. They show the patient
investigator, the close student of history, and the unwearied explorer
of the beauties of predecessors, but they give no assurances of a man
who should add aught to stock of household words, or to the rarer
and more sacred delights of the fireside or the arbor. The earliest
specimens of Shelley's poetic mind already, also, give tokens of that
ethereal sublimation in which the spirit seems to soar above the regions
of words, but leaves its body, the verse, to be entombed, without hope
of resurrection, in a mass of them. Cowley is generally instanced as a
wonder of precocity. But his early insipidities show only a capacity
for rhyming and for the metrical arrangement of certain conventional
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