The Portland daily press., 1879-05-31

Of not less beauty and in pleasanter strain
are the concluding lines of the Dedication to
the Ballads, written in 1865:
Though the many lights dwindle to one light,
There is help if the heaven has one;
Though the skies be discrowned of the sunlight,
And the earth dispossessed of the sun,
They have moonlight and sleep for repayment,
When refreshed as bride and set free,
With stars and seacwinds in her raiment,
Night sinks on the sea.
ALTERATION, which is predominant fea-
ture of Swinburne's verse, is used quite as
effectively, though less often, by the older
poets. We have Coleridge saying, in The
Ancient Mariner,
The fair breeze blew the white foam flew,
The furrow followed free
Pope sings:
Soft as the slumbers of saint forgiven
And Dryden says:
So Sospeeehless for a little space he lay.
Milton speaks of
Sonorous metal making martial sounds.
And Shakespeare,
Our dreadful marches to delightful measures.
Going further back one finds English poetry
given over to ALTERATION as obtrusive as
Swinburne's. He makes more constant use
of it than do the other modern poets, but
few of them are free from it. Who is not
familiar with the procession of Us in Tenny-
sons
The lustre of the long convolvuluses,
Or in the Often-quoted
This truth came borne with bier and pail,
felt it when sorrowed most,
Ills better to have loved and lost
Than never to have loved at all.
There is a passage in the Spanish Gipsey
that furnishes striking illustration of allit-
Grafton:
Broad-breasted Span leaning with equal love
On the mid-sea that moans with memories,
And on the untraveled ocean where vast tides
Pant dumbly passionate with dreams of youth.
William Morris, who uses all the devices
of ancient English poetry, freely uses ALTER
alton, but usually so deftly conceals it, the
hasty reader does not notice he is tripping to
the old measures. In the Lovers of Gudrun,
the most intensely passionate, with the ex-
ception of The Death of Paris, of any of the
poems that make up The Earthly Paradise,
occurs many an illustration of what the
writers about rhetoric and verse call con-
cealed ALTERATION. In some lines the device
is obvious, in others it is not so evident.
All these excerpts are probably as familiar
to Fault-Finder as to Yorick, and very like
ly we two have no quarrel to make over al
literation and so the examples quoted are
superhuous. But Yorick thanks the Fault
Finder for giving a pretext, however slight,
for the quotations: He likes to hear them,
likes to see them in new print, and thinks
they are quite as worthy of republication as
jokes about the hens that are now scratch
ing up the gardens or the strawberries that
set the paragraphers' teeth on edge. Jests
about the oyster stew and the church festi-
val appear in all the newspapers once a year
at least. Tags of the best verse that the
English language boasts, ought to have as
frequent hearing in the press.
One of the ''Fault-Finders" by profession,
one of those who grumble at so much page
and market their complaints with the pub
fishers of magazines, has been writing of
late in an English magazine about swords
affected by newspapers" Of these words is
noticeable" which is, the writer says, ''much
overworked by newspaper folk" As the
complaint is echoed by two or three Ameri-
can eclectic publications Yorick is led to be-
lieve it just On reflection all newspaper
readers will see that the word is overworked
In that respect it is not singular. Other
words are as much abused. There is ''red'
for example. Most people it is to be feared,
say that an object is ''red'' when they mean
to say it is ''red." They shouldn't do that
0,I hal haa., IA
in use for hundreds of years. Everybody
knows what it means. Uneducated people
have got hold of it and it should be dropped
The great need of the age is synonym for
it that few ever heard of; one that will send
people to the dictionaries and set them wild
for new editions if they do not find it there.
Other overworked words are ''life," 'death,"
'love," ''hate." Still others might be men
toned, but until these pass out of use it will
be proftless to speak of them.
The rider of the pale horse is an antag-
onist whom few overcome. "Launcelot" is
one of those few and the subjoined COM
munication, acceptable for its subject matter
is doubly acceptable as a bulletin of victory:
"Ars Tonga uita brera est, is so true, that none
question it, but it requires an artist to fully
appreciate its force; indeed, one who fully
appreciates it, and acts up to his convictions, is
quite likely to excite the humor of others, no
matter how closely they may agree with him.
AS illustrative of this, an anecdote of Elliot
the famous portrait painter of New York
(Which has not before appeared in PRINT may be
cited. When the Prince of Wales visited New
York a committee of gentlemen was ap-
pointed by enthusiastic citizens, to call on the
artist to arrange with him to paint the Prince
Elliot was man calm almost to stolidity, and