factured in Wedgwood ware. "The Loves of the Plants" consists of a series of metamorphoses, all of the same kind,-plants personified, having the passions of animals, or rather such passions as animals might be supposed to have, if, instead of warm blood, cool vegetable juices circulated through their veins; so that, though every lady-flower has from one to twenty beaux, all slighted and favoured in turn, the wooings and the weddings are so scrupulously Linnæan, that no human affection is ever concerned in the matter. What velvet painting can be more exquisite than the following lines, in which the various insects are touched to the very life?— "Stay thy soft murmuring waters, gentle rill; Ye painted moths, your gold-eyed plumage furl, In such descriptions Darwin excels, and his theory is triumphant; but to prove it of universal application, it must be put to a higher test. In the third canto of the "Botanic Garden," Part II., there is a fine scene-a lady, from the "wood-crowned height" of Minden, overlooking the battle in which her husband is engaged. As the conflict thickens, she watches his banner shifting from hill to hill, and when the enemy is at length beaten from every post, "Near and more near the intrepid beauty press'd, Parts her fine locks her graceful head that deck, Every syllable here is addressed to the eye; there is not a word for the heart; the poet himself might have been the bullet that shot the lady, so insensible is he of the horror of the deed. Or he might have been a surgeon, deposing before a coroner's inquest over the body, under what circumstances said lady came to her death, so anatomically correct is the process of the wound laid down; yet, even in that case, he appears a petit-maître of the scalpel, so delicately does he talk about-mark well the epithets! -the "fine locks," the "graceful head," the "fair ear," the "neck," the "red stream," the 66 azure veins," the "white veil," and the "ivory bosom ;"-a perfect inventory of the lady's charms; without a sigh, a tear, or the wink of an eyelid over the matron slain between her two children, the wife struck dead in the presence of her husband returning victorious from battle to her embrace. This may be poetry, but it is not nature; and such, in every instance, more or less, is the poetry which is formed according to artificial rules. I have not time to discuss the sequel,-the lady's last words they are equally out of character. Those who have the opportunity may compare the deathscene (much to the advantage of the living author) with that of Gertrude of Wyoming, which may have been suggested (very remotely and quite unconsciously) by Darwin's Eliza. Sir Walter Scott excels in painting battle-pieces, as overseen by some interested spectator. Eliza at Minden is circumstanced so nearly like Clara at Flodden, that the mighty Minstrel of the North may possibly have caught the idea of the latter from the Lichfield bot anist; but, oh! how has he triumphed! Poetic Licenses and Dialects. The limits of these papers will not allow us to go particularly into the subject of poetic licenses, which belong to this part of our subject. It is therefore only necessary to remark, that in every language in which metre has been framed (even in the Hebrew, though there it cannot be so accurately traced,) minstrels have taken liberties with the vernacular idiom, verbal, grammatical, and constructive; which, while they would be barbarous in speech, are yet graceful in song. The Greeks had the range of all their native dialects for ornamental use, as well as the choice of one for the staple of their verse. The delicate sprinkling of antiquated words over Virgil's pure and high latinity gives an unspeakable charm to an occasional line; and Lucretius lays more powerful hold upon the imagination itself by this spell than his cold philosophical theme, in its didactic passages, could have achieved without the aid of something so exquisitely venerable. The modern Italians have a poetic dialect so distinct from that of prose, that it may be said of the twain that they are "neither the same, nor yet unlike, as sisters well may be." What is remarkable in this musical speech (every sentence of which might be delivered in recitativo), and which is so jealous of the slightest harshness, that every consonant is guarded by a vowel,—is the circumstance, that those very vowels which give fulness and volubility to prose are frequently excluded to enrich and ennoble verse with the strength of consonants. French metre admits peculiar privileges in scanning, and requires certain reciprocities in rhyming (the alternation of what are called masculine and feminine endings), which sufficiently distinguish it from other compositions, written or spoken. Bu the delicacies of verse in this subtle and volatile tongue are with such difficulty apprehended by for. eigners, that few regard them otherwise than as real insipidities. Take a specimen from Boileau:- ‹ "Sophocle enfin, donnant l'essor à son génie, L'Art Poëtique, Chant iii. The rhymes of the first two couplets are so utterly French that an English tongue can scarcely touch or an English ear arrest them; the measure, too, is equally serpentine and slippery, being no sooner perceived in one undulation of cadence than, when you think yourself sure of catching it, it lapses into another. The last couplet, alone, is easily legible and intelligible to strangers in rhyme and accentuation. Herein, probably, I betray my own ignorance, but I believe that my countrymen in general (familiar as bad French has become in their mouths, and evasive as good is to their ears) would bear me out in the statement, as matter of fact in respect to themselves. In Spanish there are niceties of rhythm, rhyme, and corresponding terminations, neither quite rhyme nor altogether blank, which render that language one of the most pliant and effective for the utterance of poetic conceptions in almost every imaginable form of metre. No wonder that, with such plastic materials, Lopez de Vega poured forth his millions of lines as readily as melted metal may be run into all manner of moulds. The German, if it have not equal grace with some of its contemporaries of classical descent, has more comprehensiveness, and can express with enviable facility the different cadences of quantity and of accent, with either rhyme or blank endings. Our English poetry has not assumed any extraordinary prerogative in modifying words to meet its exigences, or the caprices of its professors. One only of the latter, Spenser, has dared to frame an almost arbitrary vocabulary, varying the diction of his "Faerie Queene" from that of his "Shepheard's Calender," and again in his minor pieces employing a dialect between the ruggedness of the latter, and the romantic stateliness of the former. But Spenser was one of the masters of the lyre, and if he lengthened and abridged the strings, or added to their number, according to his fancy, it was to produce harmony otherwise unattainable, and to give others, less adventurous than he, scope as well as courage to follow him into the heights and depths of our noble language, which has never yet, perhaps, been essayed through the whole compass of its scale. To suit the rhyme, the cadence, the length, or the euphony of his lines, he adopted old words, or new, added or curtailed syllables, varied terminations, violated syntax, and wrote the larger portion of his imperishable, though for ever unpopular (since his own age), compositions in what, without consummate art and management, would have very much resembled the "Babylonish dialect" of Butler's hero, "A party-colour'd dress But when he pleased to show 't, his speech His ninth eclogue begins thus:- HOBBINOL. "Diggon Davie! I bid her good day; DIGGON. Her was her, while it was day-light, And now at earst the di ke night doth haste." |