glow:  I mean only that this surrender to impassioned transports was more characteristic of the man than serene openness to influx of enjoyment.  His “Thoughts on Poetry and its Varieties,” while clear and strenuous as most of his thoughts were, are neither scientifically precise, nor do they contain any notable new idea not previously expressed by Coleridge, except perhaps the idea, that emotions are the main links of association in the poetic mind:  still his working out of the definition of poetry, his distinction between novels and poems, and between poetry and eloquence, is interesting as throwing light upon his own poetic susceptibilities.  He holds that poetry is the delineation of the deeper and more secret workings of human emotion.  It is curious to find one who is sometimes assailed as the advocate of a grovelling philosophy complaining that the chivalrous spirit has almost disappeared from books of education, that the youth of both sexes of the educated classes are growing up unromantic.  “Catechisms,” he says, “will be found a poor substitute for the old romances, whether of chivalry or faery, which, if they did not give a true picture of actual life, did not give a false one, since they did not profess to give any, but (what was much better) filled the youthful imagination with pictures of heroic men, and of what are at least as much wanted,—­heroic women.”

If Mr. Mill did not love poetry with a purely disinterested love, but with an eye to its moral causes and effects, neither did he study character from mere delight in observing the varieties of mankind.  Armand Carrel the Republican journalist, Alfred de Vigny the Royalist poet, Coleridge the Conservative, and Bentham the Reformer, are taken up and expounded, not as striking individuals, but as types of influences and tendencies.  This habit of keeping in view mind in the abstract, or men in the aggregate, may have been in a large measure a result of his education by his father; but I am inclined to think that he was of too ardent and pre-occupied a disposition, perhaps too much disposed to take favorable views of individuals, to be very sensitive to differences of character.  It should not, however, be forgotten that in one memorable case he showed remarkable discrimination.  Soon after Mr. Tennyson published his second issue of poems, Mr. Mill reviewed them in “The Westminster Review” for July, 1835, and, with his usual earnestness and generosity, applied all his powers to making a just estimate of the new aspirant.  To have reprinted this among his miscellaneous writings might have seemed rather boastful, as claiming credit for the first full recognition of a great poet:  still it is a very remarkable review; and one would hope it will not be omitted if there is to be any further collection of his casual productions.  I shall quote two passages which seem obvious enough now, but which required true insight, as well as courageous generosity, to write them in 1835—­