CHAPTER XXII.

DEPARTMENTS OF EXPRESSION-POETRY.

God to his untaught children sent

Law, order, knowledge, art, from high,

And ev'ry heav'nly favour lent,

The world's hard lot to qualify.

They knew not how they should behave,

For all from Heav'n stark-naked came;

But Poetry their garments gave,

And then not one had cause for shame.--GOETHE.

The sense of beauty enters into the highest philosophy, as in Plato. The highest poet must be a philosopher, accomplished like Dante, or intuitive like Shakespeare.-GLADSTONE.

HE world lives backward in memory as well as

THE

forward in hope. In the past are the heart's dead kindred. There are the great who rule our spirits from their urns; there our joys reappear as purer and more brilliant than they were experienced. There sorrow loses its bitterness, and is changed into a source of pleasing recollection. I love everything that's old,' says Goldsmith; and Sir William Temple, alluding to the charm of antiquity, quotes the king of Aragon as saying: 'Among so many things as are by men possessed or pursued in the whole course of their lives, all the rest are baubles beside old wood to burn, old wine to drink, old friends to converse with, and old books to read.'

That distance thus quickens the play of the imagination is the chief reason why you may observe in the poets, as already exemplified, a certain infusion of the antique element, which in ordinary modern prose is either unknown or quite exceptional-'thou,' 'thy,' 'a-weary,'

'a-gone,' 'ken,' 'dire,' 'ire,' 'list,' 'ere,' 'surcease,' 'whilom,' 'wight,' 'sooth,' 'sith,' 'erst,' etc.

You have also observed the marked distinction between the prose writer and the poet in the latter's use of enallage the constant use, for instance, of the adjective for the adverb, as in

A braying ass

Did sing most loud and clear.-Cowper.

The sower stalks

With measur'd step, and liberal throws the grain.

Thomson.

The poet's partiality for terse and euphonious compounds can hardly have escaped your attention. How forceful and beautiful are Longfellow's 'care-encumbered men,' Milton's 'young-eyed cherubim,' Shakespeare's 'black-browed night,' Homer's 'cloud-compelling Jove,' 'far-darting Apollo,' 'silver-footed Thetis,' 'many-sounding sea.' These, indeed, are only a more resonant variety of those descriptive and qualifying expressions known, in general, as epithets, which, while exhibited in their full splendor and harmony in our most vigorous prose, as Carlyle's, are most frequent in poetical composition, and happily so. You are familiar with Gray's oft-quoted

lines:

The curfew tolls the knell of parting day,

The lowing herd winds slowly o'er the lea,
The ploughman homeward plods his weary way,
And leaves the world to darkness and to me.

Now fades the glimmering landscape on the sight,
And all the air a solemn stillness holds,
Save where the beetle wheels his droning flight,

And drowsy tinklings lull the distant folds.

Now consider how much is lost by a critic's proposed omission of the epithets:

The curfew tolls the knell of day,
The herd winds slowly o'er the lea,
The ploughman homeward plods his way,
And leaves the world to me.

Now fades the landscape on the sight,
And all the air a stillness holds,

Save where the beetle wheels his flight,

And tinklings lull the folds.

In this respect Shelley surpasses all poets since the age of Elizabeth:

Beneath is a wide plain of billowy mist,

Encinctured by the dark and blooming forests,
Dim twilight lawns and stream-illumined caves,
And wind-enchanted shapes of wandering mist;
And far on high the keen sky-cleaving mountains
From icy spires of sun-light radiance fling

The dawn.

All epithets may be said to illustrate a more or less spontaneous device of the mind to call up some image that shall carry the dry fact into the heart with compact, rose-tinted vividness. The prose statement is condemned as 'over-florid' and 'affected' long before it displays that profusion of imagery which is allowed in the poetic. The more spiritual and sympathetic the insight, the richer will be the colors, the more uplifting the life, the finer the æsthetic glow. Let the following suffice for further illustration:

And winter, slumbering in the open air,

Wears on his smiling face a dream of spring.—Coleridge.

How sweet the moonlight sleeps upon this bank!

Here will we sit, and let the sounds of music

Creep into our ears; soft stillness and the night
Become the touches of sweet harmony.

Sit, Jessica: look how the floor of heaven

Is thick inlaid with patines of bright gold;

There's not the smallest orb which thou beholdest,
But in his motion like an angel sings,

Still quiring to the young-eyed cherubim.-Shakespeare.

charm, fascina

The emotions awakened by such lines tion, delight, or by whatever name expressed are the characteristic of Fine Art. They belong eminently to such poems as Tennyson's Lotos-eaters, Keats' Endymion, and Shelley's Cloud.

Rhythm.-You have seen how historians and essayists have sought to enlarge and reënforce their meaning by the subtle yet poetic aid of harmony that principle of proportion or symmetry of parts which appeals to the musical sensibility. The following passage will sufficiently refresh your recollection of this kind of movement:

God called up from dreams a man into the vestibule of heaven, saying, Come thou hither and see the glory of my house. And to the servants that stood around his throne he said, Take him and undress him from his robes of flesh; cleanse his vision, and put a new breath into his nostrils; only touch not with any change his human heart the heart that weeps and trembles. . . . Then the man sighed and stopped, shuddered and wept. His overladen heart uttered itself in tears; and he said, Angel, I will go no farther, for the spirit of man aches with this infinity. Insufferable is the glory of God. Let me lie down in the grave from the persecutions of the Infinite, for end, I see, there is none. And from all the listening stars that shone around issued a choral voice, The man speaks truly; end there is none that ever yet we heard of. End is there none? the angel solemnly demanded. Is there indeed no end, and is this the sorrow that kills you? But no voice answered that he might answer himself. Then the angel threw up his glorious hands to the heaven of heavens, saying - End is there none to the universe of God! So, also, there is no beginning!-Richter.

By carefully regarding the accent-the stress thrown upon the pronunciation of syllables—you will perceive in this an alternate swelling and lessening of sound at more or less regular intervals. It is this measured motion that we are to understand by the term rhythm, which, in the sense of recurrence or correspondence, is applied to the roll of the serf, the reverberations of thunder, the coming

and going of the seasons, the ebb and flow of ocean-tides, the revolution of the planets.

Metre. When the pulses constitute a definite succession—that is, when the rhythm is reduced to law — the result is metre. If either in Dryden's

or in Waller's

The double, double, double beat,

How sweet and fair she seems to be,

we attend to the order of accents, the syllables are seen to be so arranged that the first is to the second as the third is to the fourth and the fifth to the sixth, etc. In prose this superior regularity is inadmissible. The arrangement may be rhythmical, but never metrical· at least only fragmentarily, not characteristically or noticeably

80.

Accent, as stated above, is a particular stress or effort of voice upon certain syllables of words, which distinguishes them from the others by a greater distinctness and loudness of pronunciation. Obviously, accent tends to lengthen the quantity of a syllable- that is, the time we dwell on it. English metre, being the regular recurrence of similarly accented syllables at short intervals, thus appears related to time, or quantity, the syllable receiving the rhythm-accent requiring relatively long time (-) for its enunciation, and the unaccented relatively short time (). Thus in Wesley's

Hangs my helpless sõul on thee,

Leave, ah! leave mě nōt ălōne,

it is not meant that 'my' and 'me' are short absolutely, or that hangs' and 'not' are long in themselves, but simply with reference to the stress on syllables that precede and follow.

Theoretically, the rhythm-accent should agree with the