Note 40 — CONTENTS. (continued 4)
Reading edition
As, for instance, when he makes Homer say of the moon that
Around her throne the vivid planets roll, And stars unnumbered gild the glowing pole.
It is difficult, indeed, to understand how so thorough an astronomer as the late Admiral Smyth could have called the passage in which these lines occur one of the finest bursts of poetry in our language, except on the principle cleverly cited by Waller when Charles II. upbraided him for the warmth of his panegyric on Cromwell, that 'poets succeed better with fiction than with truth.' Macaulay, though not an astronomer, speaks more justly of the passage in saying that this single passage contains more inaccuracies than can be found in all Wordsworth's 'Excursion.'