philosophic intricacy of meaning, so it is abundant in certain audacities of style, curiosities of similitude, and wilful neologisms, towards which conservative Europe is apt to exercise less charity than are our frisky cousins over the water. Admirers there doubtless are of such pictured phrases as that of the grim sea-monster,
Shifting on bis uneasy pillow of brine:
or that of
The surly fell of Ocean's bristled neck:
or that of
The dim-aisled cathedral, whose tall arches spring
Light, sinewy, graceful, firm-set as the wing
From Michael's white shoulder.
Apologists too there may be for such eccentricities in diction as "whispery," "un-man-stifled,"[1] "enhaloed," "treeified" (applied to Daphne's metamorphosis), "bipedal," "dis-privacied," &c. Mr. Lowell's tendency to "free-and-easy" ways finds an appropriate outlet, and he makes the most of it, in the Hudibrastic rhymes of the "Fable for Critics." Coleridge dignifies as a lower species of wit those double and tri-syllable rhymes, of which Kit Smart's distich to the Welsh Squire who had promised him a hare is an amusing instance:
Tell me, thou son of great Cadwallader!
Hast sent the hare? or hast thou swallowed her?
and of which, again, one of the most ingenious on record is Byron's:
But oh! ye lords of ladies intellectual,
Inform us truly,—haven't they hen-peck'd you all?
As illustrations of Mr. Lowell's achievements in this sleight-of-hand agility, take the following—rent rudely asunder from the context, by the way, being cited merely in consideration of their rhyming characteristics:
A terrible fellow to meet in society,
Not the toast that he buttered was ever so dry at tea.
******
And your modern hexameter verses are no more
Like Greek ones than sleek Mr. Pope is like Homer;
As the roar of the sea to the coo of the pigeon is,
So, compared to your moderns, sounds old Melesigenes;
I may be too partial, the reason, perhaps, o't is
That I've[2] heard the old blind man recite bis own rhapsodies.
******
Had Theocritus written in English, not Greek,
I believe that his exquisite sense would scarce change a line
In that rare, tender, virgin-like pastoral Evangeline.[3]
******
What puff the strained sails of your praise shall you furl at, if
The calmest degree that you know is superlative?
At Rome, all whom Charon took into his wherry must,
As a matter of course, be well issimused and errimused,
A Greek, too, would feel, while in that famous boat he tossed,
That his friends would take care he was ιστοςed and ωτατοςed.
- ↑ "When then are woods and un-man-stifled places."—The Pioneer.
- ↑ Apollo loquitur.
- ↑ Alluding, of course, to Longfellow's hexametrical poem of that name.
