BookRix

Although hailed as queen of the arts and hedged about by a kind of
divinity, Poetry seems to sit on an always tottering throne. In nearly
every age known to human records, some one has chronicled his
forebodings that the days of Poetry were numbered; and again the critic,
or the Poet himself, has plucked up his courage and uttered a fairly
hopeful defence. Yet even this hope has been absent from periods which
now seem poetic in the highest degree.