You sulphurous and thought-èxecuting fìres, Vaùnt couriers of òak-clèaving thunderbolts, Sínge my white hèad! and thòu, àll-shàking thùnder, Lear. Unexpected locations of the accent double this force, and render it characteristic of passion and abruptness. And here comes into play the reader's corresponding fineness of ear, and his retardations and accelerations in accordance with those of the poet : Of unusual passionate accent, there is an exquisite specimen in the Fairy Queen, where Una is lamenting her desertion by the Red-Cross Knight : But he, my lion, and my noble lord, How does he find in cruel heart to hate See the whole stanza, with a note upon it, in the present volume. The abuse of strength is harshness and heaviness; the reverse of it is weakness. There is a noble sentiment,—it appears both in Daniel's and Sir John Beaumont's works, but is most probably the latter's, which is a perfect outrage of strength in the sound of the words: Only the firmest and the constant st hearts God sets to act the stout st and hardest parts. Stout'st and constant'st for "stoutest" and "most constant !" It is as bad as the intentional crabbedness of the line in Hudibras; He that hangs or beats out's brains, The devil's in him if he feigns. Beats out's brains, for "beats out his brains." Of heaviness, Davenant's "Gondibert" is a formidable specimen, almost throughout: With silence (òrder's help, and mark of care) They chìde that nòise which hèedless youth affèct; Who wàs, though nàked, sàfe, till prìde màde strìfe, And so he goes digging and lumbering on, like a heavy preacher thumping the pulpit in italics, and spoiling many ingenious reflections. Weakness in versification is want of accent and emphasis. It generally accompanies prosaicalness, and is the consequence of weak thoughts, and of the affectation of a certain well-bred enthusiasm. The writings of the late Mr. Hayley were remarkable for it; and it abounds among the lyrical imitators of Cowley, and the whole of what is called our French school of poetry, when it aspired above its wit and " sense. It sometimes breaks down in a horrible, hopeless manner, as if giving way at the first step. The following ludicrous passage in Congreve, intended to be particularly fine, contains an instance :— And lo! Silence himself is here; Behold the reverend shade. An ancient sigh he sits upon !!! Whose memory of sound is long since gone, Ode on the singing of Mrs. Arabella Hunt. See also the would-be enthusiasm of Addison about music : For ever consecrate the day To music and Cecilia; Music, the greatest good that mortals know, And all of heaven we have below, Music can noble HINTS impart !!! It is observable that the unpoetic masters of ridicule are apt to make the most ridiculous mistakes, when they come to affect a strain higher than the one they are accustomed to. But no wonder. Their habits neutralize the enthusiasm it requires. Sweetness, though not identical with smoothness, any more than feeling is with sound, always includes it; and smoothness is a thing so little to be regarded for its own sake, and indeed so worthless in poetry but for some taste of sweetness, that I have not thought necessary to mention it by itself; though such an all-in-all in versification was it regarded not a hundred years back, that Thomas Warton himself, an idolator of Spenser, ventured to wish the following line in the Fairy Queen, altered to And was admirèd much of fools, women, and boys And was admired much of women, fools, and boys thus destroying the fine scornful emphasis on the first syllable of "women!" (an ungallant intimation, by the way, against the fair sex, very startling in this no less woman-loving than great poet.) Any poetaster can be smooth. Smoothness abounds in ✓ all small poets, as sweetness does in the greater. Sweetness is the smoothness of grace and delicacy,-of the sympathy with the pleasing and lovely. Spenser is full of it,-ShakspeareBeaumont and Fletcher-Coleridge. Of Spenser's and Coleridge's versification it is the prevailing characteristic. Its main secrets are a smooth progression between variety and sameness, and a voluptuous sense of the continuous,-"linked sweetness long drawn out." Observe the first and last lines of the stanza in the Fairy Queen, describing a shepherd brushing away the gnats; the open and the close e's in the one, As gentle shèpherd in sweet eventide and the repetition of the word oft, and the fall from the vowel a, into the two u's in the other,— She brusheth oft, and oft doth màr their murmurings. So in his description of two substances in the handling, both equally smooth ;— Each smoother seems than each, and each than each seems smoother. An abundance of examples from his poetry will be found in the volume before us. His beauty revolves on itself with conscious loveliness. And Coleridge is worthy to be named with him, as the reader will see also, and has seen already. Let him take a sample meanwhile from the poem called the DayDream! Observe both the variety and sameness of the vowels, and the repetition of the soft consonants :— My eyes make pictures when they're shut: I see a fountain, large and fair, A willow and a ruin'd hut, And thee and me and Mary there. O Mary! make thy gentle lap our pillow; Bend o'er us, like a bower, my beautiful green willow. By Straightforwardness is meant the flow of words in their natural order, free alike from mere prose, and from those inversions to which bad poets recur in order to escape the charge of prose, but chiefly to accommodate their rhymes. In Shadwell's play of Psyche, Venus gives the sisters of the heroine an answer, of which the following is the entire substance, literally, in so many words. The author had nothing better for her to say: "I receive your prayers with kindness, and will give success to your hopes. I have seen, with anger, mankind adore your sister's beauty and deplore her scorn: which they shall do no more. For I'll so resent their idolatry, as shall content your wishes to the full." Now in default of all imagination, fancy, and expression, how was the writer to turn these words into poetry or rhyme ? Simply by diverting them from their natural order, and twisting the halves of the sentences each before the other. With kindness I your prayers receive, For their idolatry I'll so resent, As shall your wishes to the full content!! This is just as if a man were to allow that there was no poetry in the words, "How do you find yourself?" "Very well, I thank you;" but to hold them inspired, if altered into Yourself how do you find? Very well, you I thank. It is true, the best writers in Shadwell's age were addicted to these inversions, partly for their own reasons, as far as rhyme was concerned, and partly because they held it to be writing in the classical and Virgilian manner. What has since been called Artificial Poetry was then flourishing, in contradistinction to Natural; or Poetry seen chiefly through art and books, and not in its first sources. But when the artificial poet partook of the natural, or, in other words, was a true poet after his kind, his best was always written in the most natural and straightforward manner. Hear Shadwell's antagonist Dryden. Not a particle of inversion, beyond what is used for the sake of emphasis in common discourse, and this only in one line (the last but three), is to be found in his immortal character of the Duke of Buckingham:— A man so various, that he seemed to be |