...
"Dominant over all beauty is moral beauty. All highest flights of
poetry must range in the empyrean."
Thus, in poetry, all other graces and powers, be they lower or higher,
must come under control of the principle of beauty--the pleasing
harmony that brings delight. And the almost "infinite variety" of
beautiful modes and styles offered in such a gathering of poems as the
present finds argument for its worth in the brief extract with which
our _melange_ of opinions may well conclude. It is taken from a series
of articles in the New York _Independent_ on "A Theory of Poetry,"
by the Southern poet, Henry Timrod. Making a protest against the
limitation of taste and the poetic vision in certain directions,
instead of cultivating a broader range of taste, he says:
"I have known more than one young lover of poetry who read nothing but
Browning, and there are hundreds who have drowned all the poets of
the past and present in the deep music of Tennyson. But is it not
possible, with the whole wealth of literature at our command, to
attain views broad enough to enable us to do justice to genius of
every class and character? That certainly can be no true poetical
creed that leads directly to the neglect of those masterpieces which,
though wrought hundreds or thousands of years ago, still preserve the
freshness of perennial youth.
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