ON THE PRÆTERNATURAL BEING S. The poet's eye, in a fine frenzy rolling, And, as Imagination bodies forth The forms of things unknown, the poet's pen Turns them to shape, and gives to airy nothing A local habitation and a name. Midsummer Night's Dream. 12 ON THE PRÆTERNATURAL BEINGS. A S the genius of Shakespear, through the whole extent of the Poet's province, is the object of our enquiry, we should do him great injustice, if we did not attend to his peculiar felicity in those fictions and inventions, from which Poetry derives its highest distinction, and from whence it first assumed its pretenfions to divine inspiration, and appeared the affociate of Religion. The ancient Poet was admitted into the synod of the Gods: he discoursed of their natures, he repeated their counsels, and, without the charge of impiety or prefumption, disclosed their dissensions, and published their vices: He peopled the woods with Nymphs, I3 Nymphs, the Rivers with Deities; and, that he might still have fome Being within call to his afsistance, he placed responsive Echo in the vacant regions of Air. In the infant ages of the world, the credulity of Ignorance greedily received every marvellous tale: but, as mankind increased in knowledge, and a long series of traditions had established a certain mythology and hiftory, the Poet was no longer permitted to range, uncontrolled, through the boundless dominions of Fancy, but became restrained, in some measure, to things believed, or known. -Though the duty of Poetry to please and to surprise still subsisted, the means varied with the state of the world, and it foon grew necessary to make the new Inventions lean on the old Traditions.The human mind delights in novelty, and is captivated by the marvellous, but even in fable itself requires the credible.---The Poet, who can give to splendid inventions, and to fictions new and bold, the air and authority of reality and truth, is master of the genuine fources |