questioned his feelings, or be deliberately prepared to deny them. They are verses that might be very beautiful, recited with the flower before us, but which by themselves express little or nothing. In each word I hear the elaborating poet, but I am very far from seeing the object itself.

Once more, therefore, I do not deny to language generally the power of painting a corporeal whole according to its parts. It can do so, because its signs, although consecutive, are still arbitrary; but I do deny that language, as the means of poetry, possesses this power, because such verbal descriptions are entirely deficient in that illusion, which is the poet's principal aim. And this illusion, I repeat, cannot fail to be wanting, because, in the recomposition of the parts, the coexistence of the body comes into collision with the consecutiveness of language. Though, during the solution of the former into the latter, the division of the whole into its parts certainly relieves us, the final recomposition of these parts into their whole is rendered extremely difficult, and often impossible.

Everywhere, therefore, where illusion is of no importance, where the writer appeals only to the understanding of his reader, and merely aims at conveying a distinct, and, as far as it is possible, a complete idea, these descriptions of bodies, so justly excluded from poetry, are quite in place; and not only the prose writer, but even the didactic poet, (for where

he is didactic he ceases to be a poet) may make use of them with great advantage. Thus, for instance, in his Georgics, Virgil describes a cow fit for breeding

Optima torvæ

Forma bovis, cui turpe caput, cui plurima cervix,
Et crurum tenus a mento palearia pendent,
Tum longo nullus lateri modus: omnia magna,
Pes etiam; et camuris hirtæ sub cornibus aures.
Nec mihi displiceat maculis insignis et albo,
Aut juga detractans, interdumque aspera cornu,
Et faciem tauro propior, quæque ardua tota,
Et gradiens ima verrit vestigia cauda.

Or a beautiful colt :

Illi ardua cervix,

Argutumque caput, brevis alvus obesaque terga ;
Luxuriatque toris animosum pectus &c."

Here it is plain that the poet thought more about the explanation of the different parts, than about the whole. His object is to enumerate the good points of a beautiful colt, or useful cow, in such a manner, that, on meeting with one or more of them, we should be enabled to form a fair judgment of their respective value. But whether or not these good points can be recomposed into an animated picture, is a matter of perfect indifference to him.

With the exception of this use of it, the detailed description of corporeal objects, without the abovementioned device of Homer for changing what is coexisting in them into what is really successive, has always been acknowledged, by the finest judges, to be mere cold and trifling trash, to which little or no genius can be attributed. When the poetaster, says Horace, can do nothing more, he at once begins to paint a grove, an altar, a brook meandering through pleasant meads, a rapid stream, or a rainbow :

Lucus et ara Dianæ, Et properantis aquæ per amœnos ambitus agros, Aut flumen Rhenum, aut pluvius describitur arcus.

d

Pope, when a man, looked back with great contempt upon the descriptive efforts of his poetic childhood. He expressly desires that he, who would worthily bear the name of poet, should renounce description as early as possible; and declares that a purely descriptive poem is like a banquet consisting of nothing but broths (39). On Von Kleist's own authority I can assert that he took little pride in his "Spring." Had he lived longer, he would have thrown it into a totally different form. He intended to methodise it, and reflected upon the means of causing the multitude of images, which he appears to have taken at random, now here, now there, from revivified creation, to arise and follow one another

in a natural order before his eyes. He would at the same time have followed the advice, which Marmontel, doubtlessly referring to his eclogues, had bestowed on several German poets. He would have converted ▾ a series of images, thinly interspersed with feelings, into a succession of feelings but sparingly interwoven with images(40).

V

CHAPTER XVIII.

But supposing Homer himself should be found to have fallen into this cold description of material objects?

I venture to hope, that there are few passages, which will justify his being cited as an authority in its favour; and I feel assured that these will prove to be of such a kind as to confirm the rule, from which they appear to be exceptions.

We conclude, then, that succession of time is the department of the poet, as space is that of the painter.

To introduce two necessarily distant points of time into one and the same painting, as Fr. Mazzuoli has the rape of the Sabine women and their subsequent reconciliation of their husbands and relations, or, as Titian has the whole history of the prodigal son, his disorderly life, his misery, and his repentance, is an encroachment upon the sphere of the poet, which good taste could never justify.

To enumerate one by one to the reader, in order to afford him an idea of the whole, several parts or things, which, if they are to produce a whole in nature, I must necessarily take in at one glance, is an encroachment of the poet upon the sphere of the