A shipwrecked sailor, waiting for a sail:
No sail from day to day, but every day

The sunrise broken into scarlet shafts

Among the palms and ferns and precipices.

Walter Bagehot, who quotes this passage in his "Literary Studies," as an illustration of what he terms ornate poetry, says of this sailor: "The beauties of nature would not have so much occupied him. He would have known little of the scarlet shafts of sunrise and nothing of the long convolvuluses. As in Robinson Crusoe,' his own petty contrivances and his small ailments would have been the principal subjects to him." Such criticism may appear to some a little hypercritical. An extremely poetical sailor is certainly conceivable. Even if one could not possibly have had the thoughts here indicated, or at least not such thoughts exclusively, or to the extent represented by Tennyson, we feel that if any thing could justify a poet in misrepresenting the facts, it would be a desire to show a common ground of sympathy between readers of poetry and such a character, even at the expense of attributing to the latter thoughts and feelings of a more refined nature than he really would have experienced. But to see what the tendency here exemplified can do, when, without any motive to justify it, it is carried slightly further, notice, in the following, how the extravagance of the language, carried to the extreme of sentimentality, ruins the representation, because it is impossible to conceive of its being true to life. The fundamental fault of the passage lies in the fact that the subject requires no such excess of illustration. A direct account of what two young people falling in love at first sight would actually do and say in the circumstances, would have been far more effective. Not recognizing this, the poet,—an inex

perienced writer, who most likely would have developed great excellence had he lived, has put into the mouths of the two language possible only to a blasé society beau and belle making love in play. According to the poem, a lady approaching discovers a slumbering poet and exclaims:

Ha! what is this? A bright and wandered youth,
Thick in the light of his own beauty, sleeps

Like young Apollo, in his golden curls!

At the oak-roots I 've seen full many a flower,
But never one so fair. A lovely youth
With dainty cheeks and ringlets like a girl,
And slumber-parted lips 't were sweet to kiss!
Ye envious lids!

So, here's a well-worn book

From which he drinks such joy as doth a pale

And dim-eyed worker, who escapes, in Spring,

The thousand-streeted and smoke-smothered town,

And treads awhile the breezy hills of health.

[Lady opens the book, a slip of paper falls out, she reads.]

WALTER (awakening).

Fair lady, in my dream

Methought I was a weak and lonely bird,

In search of summer, wandered on the sea,

Toiling through mists, drenched by the arrowy rain,
Struck by the heartless winds; at last, methought

I came upon an isle in whose sweet air

I dried my feathers, smoothed my ruffled breast,
And skimmed delight from off the waving woods.
Thy coming, lady, reads this dream of mine:

I am the swallow, thou the summer land.

LADY.

Sweet, sweet is flattery to mortal ears,
And, if I drink thy praise too greedily,

My fault I 'll match with grosser instances.
Do not the royal souls that van the world
Hunger for praises? Does not the hero burn
To blow his triumphs in the trumpet's mouth?
And do not poets' brows throb feverous

Till they are cooled with laurels? Therefore, sir,
If such dote more on praise than all the wealth
Of precious-wombed earth and pearlèd-mains,
Blame not the cheeks of simple maidenhood.

-Life Drama, 2: Alex. Smith.

No wonder that this tough specimen of "simple maidenhood "should have prayed so fervently not to be blamed-putting her word into the plural also for her cheek in using such language to the poet before an introduction to him, and in prefacing it too with a peep at his manuscript.

There is an intimate connection between representation rendered inappropriate by the general character of the thought, and that rendered so by the smallness of the thought. In the following the same poet tells us of a youth who heard a woman singing. He had never seen her; but

When she ceased

The charmed woods and breezes silent stood,

As if all ear to catch her voice again.

Uprose the dreamer from his couch of flowers,

With awful expectation in his look,

And happy tears upon his pallid face,
With eager steps, as if toward a heaven,

He onward went, and, lo! he saw her stand,

Fairer than Dian, in the forest glade.

His footsteps startled her, and quick she turned

Her face,-looks met like swords. He clasped his hands,

And fell upon his knees; the while there broke

A sudden splendor o'er his yearning face;

'T was a pale prayer in its very self.

Thus like a worshipper before a shrine,

He earnest syllabled, and, rising up,

He led that lovely stranger tenderly

Through the green forest toward the burning west.

-Idem, 3.

In our next quotation the same tendency has passed beyond the stage of sentimentality into that of obscurity. The thought in it is so small for the kind of representation given it, as to be at times altogether invisible. It is intended to describe hot weather and a shower; and is a singular exemplification of the way in which extremes meet; for while the poet evidently supposes himself to be illustrating his subject, he is really trying to explain it. His endeavor to exercise his imaginative tendency has led him to argue; and while he thinks himself influenced by a poetic motive, it is really prosaic. Thus his style is a failure in two regards: it is both too figurative and too philosophical.

Should Solstice, stalking through the sickening bowers,
Suck the warm dew-drops, lap the falling showers;
Kneel with parched lip, and bending from its brink,
From dripping palm the scanty river drink ;
Nymphs! o'er the soil ten thousand points erect,
And high in air the electric flame collect.
Soon shall dark mists with self-attraction shroud
The blazing day, and sail in wilds of cloud;
Each silvery flower the streams aërial quaff,

Bow her sweet head, and infant harvests laugh.

-The Botanic Garden, Part First: E. Darwin.

By comparing any of the clean-cut, clear descriptions of Homer with this passage, in which, on account of the farfetched illustrative nature of the form, it needs often a second thought to detect what the poet is talking about, one will have a sufficiently forcible exemplification of the difference between poetic form that is representative, and

that which, on account of the addition to it of elements having to do merely with the illustrative methods of presenting the thought, is not representative.

The fault now under consideration characterizes, as will be noticed, all poems in which the subject does not justify the treatment,-from those like Spenser's Faerie Queene, (in which the allegory meant to illustrate the thought, and therefore an element merely of the form, is made to appear the principal thing, because developed to such an extent that one forgets all about what the subject of the poem is,) down to sensational plays, and romances of the lowest order, in which the characters, for serious, not comic purposes, are placed in situations and made to utter sentiments inconceivable in their circumstances. There is no necessity for quoting from such works here.