The Anti-Critic for Aug. 1821 and March 1822 (Paperback)

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1822 Excerpt: ...while the clouds, That crowd away before the driving wind, More ardent as the disk emerges more, Resemble most some city in a blaze, Seen through a leafless wood -.: --Perhaps it had been happier for Cowper, if he had indulged his imagination more If he had wandered farther from Self; and forgot the sad realities which often oppressed him, amid the visions of a creative mind --How striking must this appear, if we compare him with Tasso, shut in his dismal vault at Ferrara What gleam of consolation could Tasso receive but by the light of his undimmed and magical imagination? How the heart of a reader sinks even at the distance of more than two centuries at these words in a Letter of Goselini to Aldus, dated Oct. i582: - / have seen poor Tasso in a most miserable state, not in intellect, in which he appeared from a long conversation with him sound and entire; but from nakedness and hunger, which he suffers in his captivity (i) -. Of all the literary anecdotes, which I can recollect, this is the most soul-rending. It excites the most unqualified indignation; the most--- Grim-visaged, comfortless despair - Yet even here Imagination could supply a balm, and alleviate such unspeakable sufferings If ever a deity inhabited a mere mortal frame, it must have been the spirit of a deity in Tasso, which such usage, (the crime that can never be washed out from the House of Ferrara )., could not extinguish I have seen (2) and entered that dark, damp, narrow, bare-walled, maddening vault; and never, while the memory of any human misery remains with me, shall I forget it Cowper possessed no part of Tasso's magnanimity of soul. He had the feebleness, as he had the simplicity, of infancy. The great tasks of human affairs are not performed by such..