?

stood to be in verse, in the original. Mr. Hazlitt has said a good word for those prose enlargements of some fine old song, which are known by the name of Ossian; and in passages they deserve what he said; but he judiciously abstained from saying anything about the form. Is Gesner's Death of Abel a poem or Hervey's Meditations? The Pilgrim's Progress has been called one; and, undoubtedly, Bunyan had a genius which tended to make him a poet, and one of no mean order; and yet it was of as ungenerous and low a sort as was compatible with so lofty an affinity; and this is the reason why it stopped where it did. He had a craving after the beautiful, but not enough of it in himself to echo to its music. On the other hand, the possession of the beautiful will not be sufficient without force to utter it. The author of Telemachus had a soul full of beauty and tenderness. He was not a man who, if he had had a wife and children, would have run away from them, as Bunyan's hero did, to get a place by himself in heaven. He was “a little lower than the angels," like our own Bishop Jewells and Berkeleys; and yet he was no poet. He was too delicately, not to say feebly, absorbed in his devotions, to join in the energies of the seraphic choir.

Every poet, then, is a versifier; every fine poet an excellent one; and he is the best whose verse exhibits the greatest amount of strength, sweetness, straightforwardness, unsuperfluousness, variety, and one-ness; one-ness, that is to say, consistency, in the general impression, metrical and moral; and variety, or every pertinent diversity of tone and rhythm, in the process. Strength is the muscle of verse, and shows itself in the number and force of the marked syllables; as,

Sonorous metal blòwing màrtial sounds.

Paradise Lost.

Behemoth, biggest born of earth, ùphèav'd
His vastness.

Id.

Blow winds and crack your chèeks? ràge! blòw!
You càtărăcts and hurricanoes, spòut,

Till you have drènch'd our steeples, dròwn'd the còcks!

You sulphurous and thought-èxecuting fìres,
Vaùnt couriers of òak-clèaving thunderbolts,

Singe my white head! and thòu, àll-shaking thunder,
Strike flat the thick rotùndity o' the world!

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
Her that him lov'd, and ever most ador'd
As the god of my life? Why hath he me abhorr'd?

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 Hudi.

bras;

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 màrk of càre)

They chìde that noise which hèedless youth affèct;
Still course for ùse, for health they clearness wear,
And save in wèll-fìx'd àrms, all niceness chèck'd.
They thought, those that, unàrmed, expòs'd fràil life,
But naked nature vàliantly betray'd;

Who was, though nàked, safe, till prìde màde strife,
But måde defènce must ùse, nòw dànger's made.

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;
Methinks I see the midnight god appear.
In all his downy pomp array'd,

Behold the reverend shade.

An ancient sigh he sits upon !!!

Whose memory of sound is long since gone,
And purposely annihilated for his throne!!

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 admired much of fools, wòmen, 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 :o

say:

"I receive your prayers with kindness, and will give success to your