[Mark Akenside's considerable popularity in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries has not been matched by centrality in the critical canon in the twentieth, though Robin Dix's recent scholarly editions and critical work have done a great deal to restore his standing among eighteenth-century poets. Akenside's work was included in several of the standard collections of British poets in the first decades of the 1800s, as well as appearing in free-standing editions with biographies of the author by Samuel Johnson and Alexander Dyce. St Clair points out that in 1817 Akenside could still be held up by no less a critic than Hazlitt as a benchmark against which Wordsworth appeared only a ‘little inferior.’ Faraday was thus very much of his era in admiring Akenside's poetry. He copied 10 lines from his Ode VI, ‘Hymn to Cheerfulness’ into CPB:

The extract below is from Akenside's most important poem, written when he was in his very early 20s,The Pleasures of Imagination (later very substantially revised and published as The Pleasures of the Imagination). The poem appeared in 1744 on the recommendation of Samuel Johnson. The 1794 and later editions were accompanied by a preface by Anna Barbauld, who explained that the ‘ground-work’ of the poem was laid in Addison's Spectator essays collected under the same title. She stressed that the likely audience for Akenside's poem was educated, inquiring and intellectual: ‘those who have studied the metaphysics of mind, and who are accustomed to investigate abstract ideas, will read [the poem] with a lively pleasure.’ The extract comes from the fragmentary fourth book and describes the forms which creativity takes in response to beauty, dwelling especially—and in Miltonic language—on the power of the poet, whose capacity for creation Akenside extols as all but divine.