be no reason why the same principle should not be extended to the sounds by which the voice utters these emotions of the soul, and blends syllables and lines into each other. It is to supply the inherent defect of harmony in the customary mechanism of language; to make the sound an echo to the sense, when the sense becomes a sort of echo to itself; to mingle the tide of verse, the golden cadences of poetry,' with the tide of feeling, flowing and murmuring as it flows, in short, to take the language of the imagination from off the ground, and enable it to spread its wings where it may indulge its own impulses,

6

'Sailing with supreme dominion

Through the azure deep of air,'

without being stopped, or fretted, or diverted with the abruptnesses and petty obstacles, and discordant flats and sharps of prose,—that poetry was invented. It is to common language what springs are to a carriage, or wings to feet. Int ordinary speech we arrive at a certain harmony by the modulations of the voice; in poetry the same thing is done systematically by a regular collocation of syllables. It has been well observed that every one who declaims warmly, or grows intent upon a subject, rises into a sort of

blank verse or measured prose. The merchant, as described in Chaucer, went on his way 'sounding always the increase of his winning.' Every prose-writer has more or less of rhythmical adaptation, except poets, who when deprived of the regular mechanism of verse, seem to have no principle of modulation left in their writings.1

same manner.

An excuse might be made for rhyme in the It is but fair that the ear should linger on the sounds that delight it, or avail itself of the same brilliant coincidence and unexpected recurrence of syllables, that have been displayed in the invention and collocation of images. It is allowed that rhyme assists the memory; and a man of wit and shrewdness has been heard to say that the only four good lines of poetry are the well-known ones which tell the number of days in the months of the year:

'Thirty days hath September,' etc.

But if the jingle of names assists the memory, may it not also quicken the fancy? And there are other things worth having at our fingers' ends besides the contents of the almanac.

This part of the subject is treated at large in the writer's essay 'On the Prose Style of Poets' ('Plain Speaker,' i. 1-30). — ED.

I

Pope's versification is tiresome from its excessive sweetness and uniformity. Shakspeare's blank verse is the perfection of dramatic dialogue.

All is not poetry that passes for such, nor does verse make the whole difference between poetry and prose. The Iliad does not cease to be poetry in a literal translation; and Addison's 'Campaign' has been very properly denominated a Gazette in rhyme. Common prose differs from poetry, as treating for the most part either of such trite, familiar, and irksome matters of fact as convey no extraordinary impulse to the imagination, or else of such difficult and laborious processes of the understanding as do not admit of the wayward or violent movements either of the imagination or the passions.

I will mention three works which come as near to poetry as possible, without absolutely being so, namely, the Pilgrim's Progress, Robinson Crusoe, and the Tales of Boccaccio. Chaucer and Dryden have translated some of the last into English rhyme, but the essence and the power of poetry was there before. That which lifts the spirit above the earth, which draws the soul out of itself with indescribable longings, is poetry in kind, and generally fit to become so in name, by being

'married to immortal verse.' If it is of the essence of poetry to strike and fix the imagination whether we will or no, to make the eye of childhood glisten with the starting tear, to be never thought of afterwards with indifference, John Bunyan and Daniel Defoe may be permitted to pass for poets in their way. The mixture of fancy and reality in the Pilgrim's Progress was never equalled in any allegory. His pilgrims walk above the earth, and yet are on it. What zeal, what beauty, what truth of fiction! What deep feeling in the description of Christian's swimming across the water at last, and in the picture of the Shining Ones within the gates, with wings at their backs and garlands on their heads, who are to wipe all tears from his eyes! The writer's genius, though not dipped in dews of Castalie,' was baptized with the Holy Spirit and with fire. The prints in this book are no small part of it. If the confinement of Philoctetes in the island of Lemnos was a subject for the most beautiful of all the Greek tragedies,1 what shall we say to Robinson Crusoe in his? Take the speech of the Greek hero on leaving his cave, beauti

1 The Hercules Furens' of Euripides. But as to the pre-eminent beauty and merit of this tragedy, critics are at variance. - ED.

ful as it is, and compare it with the reflections of the English adventurer in his solitary place of confinement. The thoughts of home and of all from which he is forever cut off, swell and press against his bosom as the heaving ocean rolls its ceaseless tide against the rocky shore, and the very beatings of his heart become audible in the eternal silence that surrounds him. Thus he says,

As I walked about, either in my hunting, or for viewing the country, the anguish of my soul at my condition would break out upon me on a sudden, and my very heart would die within me to think of the woods, the mountains and deserts I was in; and how I was a prisoner, locked up with the eternal bars and bolts of the ocean, in an uninhabited wilderness, without redemption. In the midst of the greatest composures of my mind, this would break out upon me like a storm, and make me wring my hands, and weep like a child. Sometimes it would take me in the middle of my work, and I would immediately sit down and sigh, and look upon the ground for an hour or two together. And this was still worse to me; for if I could burst into tears or vent myself in words, it would go off, and the grief, having exhausted itself, would abate.'