Weekly national intelligencer. [volume] (Washington [D.C.]) 1841-1869, 1848-09-16
Avn honest eentleman. al his RETURN.

| The odds are that he lind handsome urn
| To his memory, and two or three young misses,
Born TO some friend who holds his wife and riches,
| And that his Argus bites him blythe breaches.
! Every one must remember, in the volupmous de-
scrpton of the revel i'm Marine Faliero,' the beau
~ of some ofhe epithets, SO suggestive Of the hid
den charms of female form:
| The music and the banquet and the wine;
! The garlands, the rose-odors, and the flowers;
| The white and the raven hair the brads
And bracelets, swsn-like bosoms, and the necklace,
An India in itself, yet dazzling not
| The eye like what it circled the thin robes,
Floating like light clouds twixt our gaze and heavn;
The many .twinkling feet, SO small and sylph.lke,
Suggesting the more secret symmetry
OF the fair forms that terminate so well.
The many-twinkling that beautifully descrip.
tive compound words, as every body knows,
used in just the same way by Gray, in the " Pro-
gress Of Poesy:"
Now pursuing, now retreaing,
Now in crclng troops they meet;
To brisk notes. in cadence beating,
Glance their many .twinkling feet.
But Gray's appropriation of fine Greek COM
pound epi,hes is notorious and this one is borrow
ed from Homer occurring in his description of the
dance in the Court of Acinous. Thompson has
applied it to the quivsring play of foliage:
Or mstling turn the many -wnkng leaves
OF aspen tall. I'm.
What the feet suggest, we have again in several
British poets; and particularly in the BRIDES dane
ing, in Sir John Stockings very pretty but some
what liquorish ballad of g the Wedding )"
Her feet, beneath her pettcoa,
Like little mice, stole in aud out,
As if they fear'd the light:
But oh she dances such way,
No sun upon an Easter day
Is half so fine sight
Burns, TOO, has the same thought, in one of his
songs: Like harmony her motions
Her pretty ankle is spy,
beraylng fair proportion.
When; in Count Hamilton's gay and graceful
mockery Of the Fairy Tales that were so fashion,
able in his day-the :. Beler blanc''-the Giant,
who is the chief listener. every thing is, in story,
inflicted upon the big by the little, much as it is in
our own politics., has been bored too numerically
by one of those long digressons in which the White
Ram 1.-THE chief narrator) often INDUCES, his giant
ship is accustomed urbanely enough to recall mas
ter Ram from his divergence-what they call in
Congress "rreevancy," and practise SO much
by saying to him, Beer, mon ami, laissons la les
reflections ct revenons nos moutons." This was
a fond sort Of reproof for vagaries in composition
or conduct practsed long ago among the gods and
heroes, in poetry and romance. In Homer, Miner
pulls her avorte, Achilles, by the hair to check
him in some deviation from prudence: as old Chap
man hath it, $685..
She came behind and took
Achilles by the yellow curs !, .....s .'
Cynthian Apollo, having for subjects people still
more discursye and ndiscreet the poets namely
was yet more addicted to this kind of practical adj
monition; and so we learn from veracious Virgil
that the God had, upon certain occasion, plucked
him by the ear:
Cum cameron reyes ct pralia, Cynthius aurem
Veit, ct admonut, Z" Pastorem, Tityre, pngues
Pascere opportat owes, deductum deere carmen"
Milton AYERS, in his Lycidas, that when he was
complaining of the shortness of life allowed by Fate
to bards he was handled much in the same man.
ner, by the same divinity:
Fame is the spur which the clear spght doth raise
That last infrmity Of noble mnd)
| To scorn delights and live lahorious days.
But the bright guerdon when we hope TO find,
And think to burst out into sudden blaze,
Comes the hind Fury, with III accursd sh ars
And Sits the thn-spun life '' Bot not the praise"
PhG5us replied, and touched my trembling ears.
Here, it is manifest that the poet of Paradise,
though shy of directly confessing it, was pucked
not merely touched. Compliment as it was, he was
too proud plainly to admit that even god had thus
tweaked him. Byron, however, frankly declares
that he was treated in that manner:
Meantime Apollo plucks me by the ear,
And tells me to my story here.
Don Juan, Canto ".
From these several instances, il seems that the
hair and are attered by what affronts the nose
a strange difference We had too, at first thought
TO perceive, through these immortal examples Sc
cond rule-nameiy, that among the gods, heroes
were good-humoredly pIucked by the locks, bards
by the ears: but we by-and-by remembered that
when Napoleon was particularly pleased with any
Of the heroes about him, he was apt to pinch them
by the ear; which pinch was looked upon as quite
equivalent to brevet. But enough for the pre-
sent; with this Bonapartean illustration, we will
pause.
TRANsYLVANIA UNIVERSITY,
MEDICAL DEPARTMENT.