"And sitting at the fall of even, beneath the bow of summer heaven" applied to a Fairy—a goblin—an Ouphe—half an inch high, dressed in an acorn helmet and butterfly-cloak, and sitting on the water in a muscle-shell, with a "brown-backed sturgeon" turning somersets over his head.
In a world where evil is a mere consequence of good, and good a mere consequence of evil—in short where all of which we have any conception is good or bad only by comparison—we have never yet been fully able to appreciate the validity of that decision which would debar the critic from enforcing upon his readers the merits or demerits of a work by placing it in juxtaposition with another. It seems to us that an adage based in the purest ignorance has had more to do with this popular feeling than any just reason founded upon common sense. Thinking thus, we shall have no scruple in illustrating our opinion in regard to what is not Ideality or the Poetic Power, by an example of what is.[1]
We have already given the description of the Sylphid Queen in the "Culprit Fay." In the "Queen Mab" of Shelley a Fairy is thus introduced—
Those who had looked upon the sight
Passing all human glory,
Saw not the yellow moon,
Saw not the mortal scene,
- ↑ As examples of entire poems of the purest ideality, we would cite the Prometheus Vinctus of Æschylus, the Inferno of Dante, Cervantes' Destruction of Numantia, the Comus of Milton, Pope's Rape of the Lock, Burns' Tam O' Shanter, the Auncient Mariner, the Christabel, and the Kubla Khan of Coleridge; and most especially the Sensitive Plant of Shelley, and the Nightingale of Keats. We have seen American poems evincing the faculty in the highest degree. (Poe's Note.)
