Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: Finally, Good Sense is the Body of poetic genius, Fancy its Drapery, Motion its Life, and Imagination the Soul that is everywhere, and in each ; and forms all into one graceful and intelligent whole.:1 11 [The reader is referred generally to Mr. Coleridge's Literary Remains, vol. II. Ed.] chapter{Section 4CHAPTER XV. The specific symptoms of poetic power elucidated in a critical analysis of Shakspeare's Venus and Adonis, and Rape Of Lucrece.' In the application of these principles to purposes of practical criticism, as employed in the appraisement of works more or less imperfect, I have endeavored to discover what the qualities in a poem are, which may be deemed promises and specific symptoms of poetic power, as distinguished from general talent determined to poetic composition by accidental motives, by an act of the will, rather than by the inspiration of a genial and productive nature. In this investigation, I could not, I thought, do better, than keep before me the earliest work of the greatest genius that perhaps human nature has yet produced, our myriad-minded.' Shakspeare,. I mean the Venus And Adonis, and the Lucrece ; works which give at once strong promises of the strength, and yet obvious proofs of the immaturity, of his genius. From these I abstracted the following marks, as characteristics of original poetic genius in general. 1. In the Venus And Adonis, the first and most obvious excellence is the perfect sweetness of the versification ; its adaptation to the subject; and thepower displayed in varying the march oi the words without passing into a loftier and more majestic rhythm than was demanded by the thoughts, or permitted by the propriety of preserving a sense of melody predominant. The delight in richness and sweetness of sound, even to a f...