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PREFACE.
There is a disposition among some contemporary critics to debar the Poet from contemporary subjects. One critic alleges these to be essentially unpoetical. Another—more skilled in delicate distinctions, and priding himself on the adroitness with which, as it were, by a dexterous turn of the wrist, he can cause the fine edge of them to wound, without vulgarly and directly thrusting—might prefer to say, apropos of each writer in turn who chooses such themes, that "at any rate this writer has not shown how contemporary subjects may be made poetical"—which remark, however, the poet, if he be a poet, can afford to
