There is Ideality in these lines- but except in the case of the
[second and the fourteenth lines]- it is Ideality not of a high order.
We have, it is true, a collection of natural objects, each
individually of great beauty, and, if actually seen as in nature,
capable of exciting in any mind, through the means of the Poetic
Sentiment more or less inherent in all, a certain sense of the
beautiful. But to view such natural objects as they exist, and to
behold them through the medium of words, are different things. Let
us pursue the idea that such a collection as we have here will
produce, of necessity, the Poetic Sentiment, and we may as well make
up our minds to believe that a catalogue of such expressions as
moon, sky, trees, rivers, mountains, &c., shall be capable of exciting
it,- it is merely an extension of the principle. But in the line
"the earth is dark, but the heavens are bright" besides the simple
mention of the "dark earth" "and the bright heaven," we have,
directly, the moral sentiment of the brightness of the sky
compensating for the darkness of the earth- and thus, indirectly, of
the happiness of a future state compensating for the miseries of the
present. All this is effected by the simple introduction of the word
but between the "dark earth" and the "bright heaven"- this
introduction, however, was prompted by the Poetic Sentiment, and by
the Poetic Sentiment alone.
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