The Portland daily press., 1876-02-19

genius to build his palaces. Whatever he
touches swel!s the towers" ''The imaeipa
tion is a faculty that fiouts at foreordination.
and Wordsworth seemed to do all he could to
cheat his readers of her company by laying out
paths with q peremptory, DO not step off the
graveH at the opening of each, and preparing
pitfalls for every conceivable emotion, with
guide boards to tell each when and where it
must be caught "The one element of great
ness which the Excursion possesses indisputa-
oily Is heaviness. He wrote too
much to write always well, for it is, not a
great Aerxes array of words, but compact
Greek ten thousand, that march safely down
to posterity." Again of Wordsworth: "His
thought seems often to lean upon Word too
weak to bear its weight" Speaking Of the
crowd OF verse-makers before Spenser: "One
strong verse that can hold itself upright by the
bare help of the substantive and verb is worth
acres of this dead cord.wood, piled stick upon
stick, boundless continuity of drynsss." OF
bills of exchange, invented by Dante's Floren.
tines: ''By endowing Value with the
gift of fern-seed and enabling it to walk invisi-
BILE "they turned the flank of the baroni IL tar
if-sy stem and made the roads safe for the
greater lberalizer Commerce" ''Though
Dante's conception of the highest end of man
was that he should climb through every phase
of human experience to that transcendental
and supersensual region where the true, the
good and the beautiful blend in the white light
of God, yet the prism of bis Imagination for
ever resolved the ray into color again, and he
loved to show it also where, entanged and OBJ
structed in matter, it became beautiful once
more to the eye of sense" Dante's gentleness
is al! the more striking by contrast, like that
silken compensation which blooms out of the
thorny stem of the cactus.'' OF Dante again,
''If the circle of his affections, as with perss-
tent natures commonly, was narrow, his
thought swept broad horizon from that tower
OF absolute self which he had reared for its
speculation" Of Dante and the Divine Come
dy: ut is wonderful that out of the very wreck
OF his own life he should have built this three
arched bridge, still firm against the wash and
wear of ages, stretching from the Pit to the
Empyrean, BY which men may pass from a
doubt of Gods providence to certainty of his
long-suffering and loving kindness" End
| less aspiration of all the faculties became the
| ideal of Christian life, and to express it more
or less perfectly the ideal of essentially Chris
tian art. 1t is this which the Middle Ages in
stinctively typifed in the Gothic cathedral-
no accidental growth, but the visible symbol
of an inward faitb,-which scars forever up
waId, and yearns toward heaven like a martyr
| flame suddenly turned to stone." OF the lines
| of Gawain Douglas prefxed to a translation
of the Eneid: ''There is certainly some poetic
H. -
comes as near enthusiasm as is possible for a
ploughman, with good steady yoke of oxen,
who lays over one furrow of verse; and then
turns about TO lay the next as cleyery along
side of it as he can" OF the time of the
"Mirror for Magistrates and the "Polyolbion:" :"
'This was the period of the Saurians in Eng
lish poetry, interminable poems book after
| book and canto after canto, like far stretching
Uertebre, that on first sight would seem to
have rendered earth unfit for the babitation of
man. They, most of them sleep well, now, as
once they made their readers sleep, and their
huge remains lie embedded in the deep mo-
rasses of Chambers & Anderson" The moral
of a poem should be suggested, as when in
some medieval church we cast down our eyes
to muse over fresco of Giotto, and are re-
minded of the transformers of life by the
mortuary tablets under our feet. $50 entirely
are beauty and delight in it the native element
of Spencer, that, whenever in the Faery
| Queen you come suddenly on the moral it
gives you shock of unpleasant surprise, as
when ones teeth close on bit of gravel in a
dish of strawberries and cream" Referring
to certain old canons of taste: "The most pro-
| Of hot
was good poetry that could not De translated
into good prose, as if one should say that the
test of sufficient moonlight was that tallow-
candles could be made of It," OF Words
worth's sister Dorothy and her influence upon
the poet: 1t was she who called forth the shy
er sensibilties of his nature, and taught an
originally harsh and austere imagination to
surround itself with fancy and feeling, as tbe
rock fringes itself with sun-spray Of ferns 4"
These detached sentences give an idea of the
boundless wit and wealth of illustration which
enrich the essays, but they convey faint hint of
the critical acumen, the ample treatment, the
wise judgment which give them their great
value. Our porch is so extensive that we have
| left scant room on our little lot for the
house, and must content ourselves with inade-
quate mention of the subject matter of the
book. The essays are five in number, and the
great names dwelt upon aIe Dante, Spencer,
Wordsworth, Milton and Keats. They have all
been published before in other form, some in
the North American Review, others in a Bos-
ton edition of the English poets; but they
have nearly all been enlarged and some COM
pletely remodelled. The longest essay in the
| volume, that on Dante, is a most important
contribution to critical literature, and founded
on the sympathetic and discriminating study
| of twenty years. The text, or pretext, is Miss
Rossetti's SHADOW of Dante" but Mr.. Low
ell wanders away at once from consideration of
| that and gives instead mastery analysis of
| the character and poetry of the great Floren-
tine. "We cannot help thinking" he says,
shat if Shakespeare be the most comprehen-
sive intellect, Dante is the highest spiritual
nature that has expressed itself in rhythmic
| FORM" He looks upon him as the founder of
modern literature, as the first Christian poet,
''the first who go subdued dogma to the uses of
| plastic Imagination as to make something that
is still poetry of the highest order even after it
| has Suffered the disenchantment inevitable in
the most perfect translation. The Christian
idea had not yet incorporated itself. 1t was
| to make its avatar in Dante" The clos
ing words of the essay are cat the Round
Table of King Arthur there was left always
one seat vacant for him who should accomplish
the adventure of the Holy Grail 1t was called
the perilous seat, because of the dangers he
must encounter who would win it. In the
company of the epic poets there was place
left for whoever should embody the Christian
| idea of triumphant life, outwardly all de-
feat, inwardly victorious; who should make US
partakers of the cup of sorrow in which all
are communicants with Chris. He who should
do this would indeed achieve the perilous seat,