The English Helicon: A Selection of Modern Poetry (Classic Reprint)

Excerpt from The English Helicon: A Selection of Modern Poetry

There is a general complaint amongst the children of song, that. The taste for poetry is on the decline amongst us; and something like a disposition to fear that, amid the progress of utilitarian objects, there is danger of its total extinction in the land. If the question thus raised were to be decided by the degree of attention which the hard of our day is enabled to com mand for his inspirations, as compared with the enthusiasm which hailed the songs of his brethren twenty years ago, there would, certainly, be some reason for these gloomy anticipations. But the poet should be the last to despair of the indefeasible ascend ancy and final triumph of his art. A more philosophical View of the matter will assuredly convince him that there is nothing in the immediate neglect under which it lies, whence any infer ence is to be drawn as to its ultimate decline. Its outward fortunes, like those of everything whose manifestations make their appeal to the public taste, must be subject to the fluctuations of the national mind; but its essential influence, as an interpreter of all the natural and moral aspects of the world, and as speaking to the universal passions of the human heart, has a sway as old.

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