With his wonted clearness he distinguishes
Wisdom from understanding, talents, capacity, ability, sagacity,
sense, &c. and defines it as that exercise of the reason into which
the heart enters--a structure of the understanding rising out of the
moral and spiritual nature. Then follows a section on _Children_,
which explodes not a few educational fallacies, and propounds certain
articles of faith and practice wholesome for these times, though it
will probably wear a prim and quakerish aspect to the admirers of Jean
Paul's famous tractate[10] on the same theme. The concluding paper in
this series, entitled _The Life Poetic_, is the liveliest, if not the
most valuable of the six: it has, however, been charged, with
considerable show of justice, with a tendency to strip genius of all
that is individual and spontaneous, or to accredit it only 'when it
moves abroad sedately, clad in the uniform of a peculiar college.' Mr
Taylor's 'solicitous and premeditated formalism' of poetical doctrine
is, it must be confessed, a little too strait-laced.
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