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sitions, and in the sober majesty of lofty sense, it appeared to them to approach more nearly than any other poetry they had heard, to the style of our Bible in the prophetic books. The first strophe will suffice as a specimen :—

"Ye harp-controlling hymns! (or) ye hymns the sovereigns of harps! What God? what Hero?

What Man shall we celebrate?
Truly Pisa indeed is of Jove,

But the Olympiad (or the Olympic games) did Hercules establish,
The first-fruits of the spoils of war.

But Theron for the four-horsed car,

That bore victory to him,,

It behoves us now to voice aloud:
The Just, the Hospitable,

The Bulwark of Agrigentum,
Of renowned fathers

The Flower, even him

Who preserves his native city erect and safe."

But are such rhetorical caprices condemnable only for their deviation from the language of real life? and are they by no other means to be precluded, but by the rejection of all distinctions between prose and verse, save that of metre? Surely good sense, and a moderate insight into the constitution of the human mind, would be amply sufficient to prove, that such language and such combinations are the native produce neither of the fancy nor of the imagination; that their operation consists in the excitement of surprise by the juxta-position and apparent reconciliation of

Also thou quenchest the pointed thunder-bolt

Of everlasting fire; for Jove's Eagle sleeps on the sceptre, his swift wing drooping on each side,

King of Birds,

When o'er his curv'd head thou hast pour'd a dark mist, sweet seal of his eyelids, he slumbering

Lifts up the plumes of his back, overcome by thy vibrations.

Yea, and ev'n impetuous Mars, far away from the bristling spear-ranks, Softens his heart with sleep, and thy shafts soothe the souls of the divinities,

Through the skill of Latona's son, Apollo, and the deep-bosom'd Muses.

Gray and Akenside have each given a modification of this passage, the one in the Progress of Poetry, the other in his Hymn to the Naiads. S. C.]

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widely-different or incompatible things. As when, for instance, the hills are made to reflect the image of a voice. Surely, no unusual taste is requisite to see clearly, that this compulsory juxta-position is not produced by the presentation of impressive or delightful forms to the inward vision, nor by any sympathy with the modifying powers with which the genius of the poet had united and inspirited all the objects of his thought; that it is, therefore, a species of wit, a pure work of the will, and implies a leisure and self-possession, both of thought and feeling, incompatible with the steady fervor of a mind possessed and filled with the grandeur of its subject. To sum up the whole in one sentence: When a poem, or a part of a poem, shall be adduced which is evidently vicious in the figures and contexture of its style, yet for the condemnation of which no reason can be assigned, except that it differs from the style in which men actually converse, then, and not till then, can I hold this theory to be either plausible or practicable, or capable of furnishing either rule, guidance, or precaution, that might not, more easily and more safely, as well as more naturally, have been deduced in the author's own mind, from considerations of grammar, logic, and the truth and nature of things, confirmed by the authority of works whose fame is not of one country nor of one age.

CHAPTER XIX.

Continuation.-Concerning the real object which, it is probable, Mr. Wordsworth had before him in his critical preface.-Elucidation and application of this.

It might appear, from some passages in the former part of Mr. Wordsworth's preface, that he meant to confine his theory of style, and the necessity of a close accordance with the actual language of men, to those particular subjects from low and rustic life, which, by way of experiment, he had purposed to naturalize as a new species in our English poetry. But from the train of argument that follows; from the reference to Milton; and from the spirit of his critique on Gray's sonnet; those sentences appear to have been rather courtesies of modesty, than actual limitations of his system. Yet so groundless does this system appear on a close examination; and so strange and overwhelming' in its consequences, that I cannot, and I do not, believe that the poet did ever himself adopt it in the unqualified sense, in which his expressions have been understood by others, and which, indeed, according to all the common laws of interpretation, they seem to bear. What then did he mean? I apprehend, that in the clear perception, not unaccompanied with disgust or contempt, of the gaudy affectations of a style which passed current with too many

1 I had in my mind the striking but untranslatable epithet, which the celebrated Mendelssohn applied to the great founder of the Critical Philosophy, "Der alleszermalmende KANT," that is, the all-becrushing, or rather the all-to-nothing-crushing Kant. In the facility and force of compound epithets, the German from the number of its cases and inflections approaches to the Greek, that language so

"Bless'd in the happy marriage of sweet words."

It is in the woeful harshness of its sounds alone that the German need shrink from the comparison.

for poetic diction (though in truth it had as little pretensions to poetry, as to logic or common sense), he narrowed his view for the time; and feeling a justifiable preference for the language of nature and of good sense, even in its humblest and least ornamented forms, he suffered himself to express, in terms at once too large and too exclusive, his predilection for a style the most remote possible from the false and showy splendor which he wished to explode. It is possible, that this predilection, at first merely comparative, deviated for a time into direct partiality. But the real object which he had in view, was, I doubt not, a species of excellence which had been long before most happily characterized by the judicious and amiable Garve, whose works are so justly beloved and esteemed by the Germans, in his remarks on Gellert, from which the following is literally translated. "The talent, that is required in order to make excellent verses, is perhaps greater than the philosopher is ready to admit, or would find it in his power to acquire: the talent to seek only the apt expression of the thought, and yet to find at the same time with it the rhyme and the metre. Gellert possessed this happy gift, if ever any one of our poets possessed it; and nothing perhaps contributed more to the great and universal impression which his fables made on their first publication, or conduces more to their continued popularity. It was a strange and curious phenomenon, and such as in Germany had been previously unheard of, to read verses in which everything was expressed just as one would wish to talk, and yet all dignified, attractive, and interesting; and all at the same time perfectly correct as to the measure of the syllables and the rhyme. It is certain, that poetry when it has attained this excellence makes a far greater impression than prose. So much so indeed, that eyen the gratification which the very rhymes afford, becomes then no longer a contemptible or trifling gratification."2

However novel this phenomenon may have been in Germany at the time of Gellert, it is by no means new, nor yet of recent existence in our language. Spite of the licentiousness with

2 Sammlung einiger Abhandlungen von Christian Garve. [Leipzig, 1779, pp. 233-4, with slight alterations. S. C.]

which Spenser occasionally compels the orthography of his words into a subservience to his rhymes, the whole FAIRY QUEEN is an almost continued instance of this beauty. Waller's song, Go, LOVELY ROSE, is doubtless familiar to most of my readers; but if I had happened to have had by me the Poems of Cotton, more but far less deservedly celebrated as the author of the VIRGIL TRAVESTIED, I should have indulged myself, and I think have gratified many, who are not acquainted with his serious works, by selecting some admirable specimens of this style. There are not a few poems in that volume, replete with every excellence of thought, image, and passion, which we expect or desire in the poetry of the milder muse; and yet so worded, that the reader sees no reason either in the selection or the order of the words, why he might not have said the very same in an appropriate conversation, and cannot conceive how indeed he could have expressed such thoughts otherwise, without loss or injury to his meaning.3

3 [Charles Cotton, the poet, was born of a good family in Staffordshire in 1630, died at Westminster in 1687. His Scarronides or Virgil Travestie, a burlesque on the first and fourth books of the Æneid, was printed for the fifteenth time in 1771. The first book was first published in 1664. It seems to have owed its popularity less to its merits than to its piquant demerits, which were infused into it, because, as the author says in the Epilogue to another work in the same style, Burlesque upon Burlesque (quoted in Sir H. Nicholas's Memoirs) in the "precious age " in which he lived,

"Coarse hempen trash was sooner read,
Than poems of a finer thread,"

and therefore he must

wisely choose

To dizen up his dirty muse,

In such an odd fantastic weed,

As every one, he knew, would read:"

thus coolly resolving to minister to the worse than levity of his age instead of aiming to correct it. The Biographie Universelle affirms that to compare the Virgil Travestie to Hudibras is to compare a caricature to a painting which, though a little overcharged, has a great foundation of truth. He published several prose works besides the Second Part of the Complete Angler. Sir Harris Nicholas observes, that as these "consist almost en

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