I like reading Hesiod, meaning the Works and Days. If every verse is not
poetry, it is, at least, good sense, which is a great deal to say.
* * * * *
There is nothing real in the Georgies, except, to be sure, the verse.[1]
Mere didactics of practice, unless seasoned with the personal interests of
the time or author, are inexpressibly dull to me. Such didactic poetry as
that of the Works and Days followed naturally upon legislation and the
first ordering of municipalities.
[Footnote 1:
I used to fancy Mr. Coleridge _paulo iniquior Virgilio_, and told him so;
to which he replied, that, like all Eton men, I swore _per Maronem_. This
was far enough from being the case; but I acknowledge that Mr. C.'s
apparent indifference to the tenderness and dignity of Virgil excited my
surprise.--ED.]
* * * * *
All genius is metaphysical; because the ultimate end of genius is ideal,
however it may be actualized by incidental and accidental circumstances.
* * * * *
Don Quixote is not a man out of his senses, but a man in whom the
imagination and the pure reason are so powerful as to make him disregard
the evidence of sense when it opposed their conclusions. Sancho is the
common sense of the social man-animal, unenlightened and unsanctified by
the reason. You see how he reverences his master at the very time he is
cheating him.
_August_ 14. 1832.