want of which occasions a stumble or pause on the part of the reader. Sometimes he uses terms in uncommon acceptations, or combines them in an unusual manner, or substitutes one for another, apparently for the sake of metre or rhyme. All these are imperfections, and are felt to be such, and evidently arise from a want of care or skill to overcome the difficulties inseparable from metrical composition. The third Canto of Childe Harold, although far superior to its predecessors in power of thought, is below them in adequacy of expression and in complete development of ideas; and furnishes numerous instances of the imperfections already described. In this canto, also, there are more passages than in the former ones, in which it is easy to perceive that the turn of thought is rather the result of the rhyme than of the spontaneous suggestions of the writer's free and unimpeded mind. It is difficult, for instance, to conceive that in the following passage he would have introduced the figure in the fifth line, but for the necessity of the rhyme :

"

'He, who grown aged in this world of woe,

In deeds, not years, piercing the depths of life,
So that no wonder waits him; nor below
Can love, or sorrow, fame, ambition, strife,
Cut to his heart again with the keen knife
Of silent, sharp endurance."

This must be felt to be exceedingly harsh, and even incongruous. The figure is bad, and the expression not much better. The phrase,

the keen knife of sharp endurance," attributes the quality of the sufferer to that which inflicts the suffering; a knife is a weapon of infliction, not an instrument of endurance. The figure is evidently the result of the necessity in which the poet was to find a word rhyming to strife; the solecism in the thought can have proceeded only from negligence.

In the next stanza, the exactions of the verse are equally perceptible, and the meaning of the poet is but obscurely developed :

""Tis to create, and, in creating, live

A being more intense, that we endow
With form our fancy, gaining as we give

The life we image, even as I do now.

What am I? Nothing: but not so art thou,
Soul of my thought! with whom I traverse earth,
Invisible but gazing, as I glow

Mix'd with thy spirit, blended with thy birth,

And feeling still with thee in my crush'd feelings dearth."

By the expression in the last line, the poet, I presume, means the desolation of his wounded feelings, but the literal interpretation would be the want or deficiency of wounded feelings. The thought intended to be conveyed is good, but the phrase can hardly be surpassed in harshness, and would never have entered his mind had he been writing blank verse. The whole stanza, I may add, requires more intellectual labour to comprehend it than poetry should ever exact, and in the case of many readers the labour would be vain. It is an example of imperfect development of a train of interesting reflections. The following stanza appears to me a still more remarkable instance of the way in which the poet's thoughts have been shaped-I may even venture to say distorted, by the necessity of providing the prescribed number of rhyming terminations:

"Sky, mountains, river, winds, lake, lightnings! ye!
With might, and clouds, and thunder, and a soul
To make these felt and feeling, well may be
Things that have made me watchful; the far roll
Of your departing voices is the knoll

Of what in me is sleepless,-if I rest.

But where of ye, oh, tempests! is the goal?
Are

ye like those within the human breast?
Or do ye find, at length, like eagles, some high nest ?”

The last five lines are the mere creatures of the rhyme, and the three concluding ones strike me as quite ludicrous in point of expression. "But where, oh tempests! is the goal of ye?" is a question which I suspect few could ask without a breach of gravity, nor would that dignified quality be greatly strengthened by the subsequent inquiry respecting the nest of a tempest.

Similar harshnesses and puerilities of phraseology will be found in many other parts of the same canto. Speaking of Rousseau, he says, that "he was phrenzied to that worst pitch of all which wears a reasonable show :" of a broken mirror, that "it makes a thousand images of one that was:" of the heart, that "it lives in shatter'd guise."

These are phrases which a good writer would hardly have suffered to pass, had it not been for the illusion of the verse, which sometimes palms expressions on both writer and reader for beautiful or significant, when they are in truth both unlovely and unmeaning.

It may be laid down as a principle, that the composition is imperfect whenever a poet adopts a word, a mode of expression, a peculiar construction, an inversion, an ellipsis, an

image, or a metaphor, which he would not have adopted had the trammels of metre and rhyme left him free to choose. It is very difficult, it is true, to avoid this, but in proportion as it is avoided, the verse will rise in merit and effect. That poetry in which nothing appears to be the consequence of the difficulties to be encountered in this species of composition, is always the most delightful, and dwells the longest on the memory. The passages most frequently quoted are, with few exceptions, all of this kind. In this respect, Pope is conspicuously excellent so is Gray: so, in many parts of his poetry, is Lord Byron, while in others he is as conspicuously defective. The excellence in question is the result of labour, and the want of it in so powerful a poet, whenever it occurs, shows that in that particular passage he has too soon been content with himself. The truth is, that there must be labour somewhere either on the part of the poet or on the part of the reader; and it is a little unreasonable in the former to require from the latter what he has himself declined.

Farewell.

F. R.