Explore "Thucydides, Tacitus, and Poetry" by Samuel Taylor Coleridge on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
The object of Thucydides was to show the ills resulting to Greece from the / separation and conflict of the spirits or elements of democracy and / oligarchy. The object of Tacitus was to demonstrate the desperate / consequences of the loss of liberty on the minds and hearts of men.
A poet ought not to pick nature's pocket: let him borrow, and so borrow as / to repay by the very act of borrowing. Examine nature accurately, but write / from recollection; and trust more to your imagination than to your memory.
Really the metre of some of the modern poems I have read, bears about the / same relation to metre properly understood, that dumb bells do to music; / both are for exercise, and pretty severe too, I think.
Nothing ever left a stain on that gentle creature's mind, which looked upon / the degraded men and things around him like moonshine on a dunghill, which / shines and takes no pollution. All things are shadows to him, except those / which move his affections.