"The crows, sir," he said of the latter, "impede your fall." Their town breeding, and possibly, as we saw in the case of Dr.Johnson, an actual physical disability, made them distrust any clear and sympathetic rendering of the sense impressions which nature creates.

One cannot imagine Dr.
Johnson caring much for the minute observations of Tennyson's nature poems, or delighting in the verdurous and mossy alleys of Keats.

His test in such a case would be simple; he would not have liked to have been in such places, nor reluctantly compelled to go there would he in all likelihood have had much to say about them beyond that they were damp.

For the poetry--such as Shelley's--which worked by means of impalpable and indefinite suggestion, he would, one may conceive, have cared even less.

New modes of poetry asked of critics new sympathies and a new way of approach.