Publisher's Synopsis
Excerpt from The Relation of the Poet to His Age: A Discourse Delivered Before the Phi Beta Kappa Society of Harvard University, on Thursday, August 21, 1813
Dense the delicate spirit of beauty which hovers over the earth, like an atmosphere, and to give shape, color and movement to its airy essence. Life presents itself to our View in a twofold as pect. It has its poetical and prosaic side; its face and its reverse; and different minds, by a natural affinity, are attracted to one or the other of these aspects; and indeed the same mind often passes from one to the other, as it is swayed by different moods. Hence we have tragedy and farce; the historical picture and the caricature; the poem and the parody; hence the gods of Homer and the gods of Lucian, the romance of chivalry and Don Quixote. A thousand poetical associations invest the ocean, the sailor and the ship all of which vanish, like a ghost at cock-crow, at the thought of tar, sea - sickness and libels for wages. There are many charming pictures of woodland life in English poetry, as in the early ballads, and best of all, in As You Like It and in reading these, we grant the poet his own terms. We are willing to observe from his point of View, and to overlook the plain facts of the case. We forget the miserable discomforts inseparable from such a life, which must have made it intolerable.
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