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, 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 o

say:

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

nopes. 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,
And to your hopes success will give.
I have, with anger, seen mankind adore
Your sister's beauty and her scorn deplore;
Which they shall do no more.

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
Not one, but all mankind's epitome:

Stiff in opinions, always in the wrong,
Was everything by starts, and nothing long ;
But in the course of one revolving moon
Was chemist, fiddler, statesman, and buffoon:
Then all for women, rhyming, dancing, drinking,
Besides ten thousand freaks that died in thinking.
Blest madman! who could every hour employ
With something new to wish or to enjoy!
Railing and praising were his usual themes;
And both, to show his judgment, in extremes:
So over violent, or over civil,

That every man with him was god or devil.
In squandering wealth was his peculiar art;
Nothing went unrewarded, but desert.
Beggar'd by fools, whom still he found too late,
He had his jest, and they had his estate.

Inversion itself was often turned into a grace in these poets, and may be in others, by the power of being superior to it; using it only with a classical air, and as a help lying next to them, instead of a salvation which they are obliged to seek. In jesting passages also it sometimes gave the rhyme a turn agreeably wilful, or an appearance of choosing what lay in its way; as if a man should pick up a stone to throw at another's head, where a less confident foot would have stumbled over it. Such is Dryden's use of the word might—the mere sign of a tensein his pretended ridicule of the monkish practice of rising to sing psalms in the night.

And much they griev'd to see so nigh their hall
The bird that warn'd St. Peter of his fall;
That he should raise his mitred crest on high,
And clap his wings and call his family
To sacred rites; and vex th' ethereal powers
With midnight matins at uncivil hours;
Nay more, his quiet neighbors should molest
Just in the sweetness of their morning rest.

(What a line full of "another doze" is that!)

What if his dull forefathers used that cry?

Could he not let a bad example die?

I the more gladly quote instances like those of Dryden, to illustrate the points in question, because they are specimens of the very highest kind of writing in the heroic couplet upon subjects not heroical. As to prosaicalness in general, it is sometimes indulged in by young writers on the plea of its being natural; but this is a mere confusion of triviality with propriety, and is usually the result of indolence.

Unsuperfluousness is rather a matter of style in general, than of the sound and order of words: and yet versification is so much strengthened by it, and so much weakened by its opposite, that it could not but come within the category of its requisites. When superfluousness of words is not occasioned by overflowing animal spirits, as in Beaumont and Fletcher, or by the very genius of luxury, as in Spenser (in which cases it is enrichment as well as overflow), there is no worse sign for a poet altogether, except pure barrenness. Every word that could be taken away from a poem, unreferable to either of the above reasons for it, is a damage; and many such are death; for there is nothing that posterity seems so determined to resent as this want of respect for its time and trouble. The world is too rich in books to endure it. Even true poets have died of this Writer's Evil. Trifling ones have survived, with scarcely any pretensions but the terseness of their trifles. What hope can remain for wordy mediocrity? Let the discerning reader take up any poem, pen in hand, for the purpose of discovering how many words he can strike out of it that give him no requisite ideas, no relevant ones that he cares for, and no reasons for the rhyme beyond its necessity, and he will see what blot and havoc he will make in many an admired production of its day,-what marks of its inevitable fate. Bulky authors in particular, however safe they may think themselves, would do well to consider what parts of their cargo they might dispense with in their proposed voyage down the gulfs of time; for many a gallant vessel, thought indestructible in its age, has perished ;--many a load of words, expected to be in eternal demand, gone to join the wrecks of