We
do not hesitate to say that a man highly endowed with the powers of
Causality- that is to say, a man of metaphysical acumen- will, even
with a very deficient share of Ideality, compose a finer poem (if we
test it, as we should, by its measure of exciting the Poetic
Sentiment) than one who, without such metaphysical acumen, shall be
gifted, in the most extraordinary degree, with the faculty of
Ideality. For a poem is not the Poetic faculty, but the means of
exciting it in mankind. Now these means the metaphysician may discover
by analysis of their effects in other cases than his own, without even
conceiving the nature of these effects- thus arriving at a result
which the unaided Ideality of his competitor would be utterly
unable, except by accident, to attain. It is more than possible that
the man who, of all writers, living or dead, has been most
successful in writing the purest of all poems- that is to say, poems
which excite more purely, most exclusively, and most powerfully the
imaginative faculties in men- owed his extraordinary and almost
magical preeminence rather to metaphysical than poetical powers. We
allude to the author of Christabel, of the Rime of the Ancient
Mariner, and of Love- to Coleridge- whose head, if we mistake not
its character, gave no great phrenological tokens of Ideality, while
the organs of Causality and Comparison were most singularly developed.
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