Chapter CI: Preface: To the First Edition

[Pp. [xiii]-xvi.]

Compositions resembling those of the present volume are not unfre/quently condemned for their querulous Egotism. But Egotism is to be / condemned then only when it offends against Time and Place, as in an / History or an Epic Poem. To censure it in a Monody or Sonnet is almost / as absurd as to dislike a circle for being round. Why then write Sonnets / or Monodies? Because they give me pleasure when perhaps nothing else / could. After the more violent emotions of Sorrow, the mind demands / amusement, and can find it in employment alone; but full of its late / sufferings, it can endure no employment not in some measure connected / with them. Forcibly to turn away our attention to general subjects is / a painful and most often an unavailing effort:

But O! how grateful to a wounded heart
The tale of Misery to impart--
From others' eyes bid artless sorrows flow,
And raise esteem upon the base of woe! 15
SHAW.

The communicativeness of our Nature leads us to describe our own / sorrows; in the endeavour to describe them, intellectual activity is exerted; / and from intellectual activity there results a pleasure, which is gradually / associated, and mingles as a corrective, with the painful subject of the / description. "True!" (it may be answered) "but how are the PUBLIC / interested in your Sorrows or your Description?" We are for ever / attributing personal Unities to imaginary Aggregates.--What is the PUBLIC, / but a term for a number of scattered Individuals? Of whom as many / will be interested in these sorrows, as have experienced the same or / similar.

"Holy be the lay,
Which mourning soothes the mourner on his way."

If I could judge of others by myself, I should not hesitate to affirm, that / the most interesting passages in our most interesting Poems are those, in / which the Author developes his own feelings. The sweet voice of Cona[1144:1] / never sounds so sweetly as when it speaks of itself; and I should almost / suspect that man of an unkindly heart, who could read the opening of the / third book of the Paradise Lost without peculiar emotion. By a law of / our Nature, he, who labours under a strong feeling, is impelled to seek for / sympathy; but a Poet's feelings are all strong. Quicquid amet valde amat. / Akenside therefore speaks with philosophical accuracy, when he classes / Love and Poetry, as producing the same effects:

"Love and the wish of Poets when their tongue
Would teach to others' bosoms, what so charms 40
Their own."--PLEASURES OF IMAGINATION.

There is one species of Egotism which is truly disgusting; not that / which leads us to communicate our feelings to others, but that which / would reduce the feelings of others to an identity with our own. The / Atheist, who exclaims, "pshaw!" when he glances his eye on the praises / of Deity, is an Egotist: an old man, when he speaks contemptuously of / Love-verses is an Egotist: and the sleek Favorites of Fortune are / Egotists, when they condemn all "melancholy, discontented" verses. / Surely, it would be candid not merely to ask whether the poem pleases / ourselves but to consider whether or no there may not be others to whom / it is well-calculated to give an innocent pleasure.

I shall only add that each of my readers will, I hope, remember that / these Poems on various subjects, which he reads at one time and under / the influence of one set of feelings, were written at different times and / prompted by very different feelings; and therefore that the supposed / inferiority of one Poem to another may sometimes be owing to the temper / of mind, in which he happens to peruse it.

[Pp. [xvii]-xx.]