propriety, and without effect. The poetical prose-writer stops to describe an object, if he admires it, or thinks it will bear to be dwelt on the genuine prose-writer only alludes to or characterises it in passing, and with reference to his subject. The prose-writer is master of his materials: the poet is the slave of his style. Everything showy, everything extraneous tempts him, and he reposes idly on it: he is bent on pleasure, not on business. He aims at effect, at captivating the reader, and yet is contented with commonplace ornaments, rather than none. Indeed, this last result must necessarily follow, where there is an ambition to shine, without the effort to dig for jewels in the mine of truth. The habits of a poet's mind are not those of industry or research: his images come to him, he does not go to them; and in prose-subjects, and dry matters of fact and close reasoning, the natural stimulus that at other times warms and rouses, deserts him altogether. He sees no unhallowed visions, he is inspired by no daydreams. All is tame, literal, and barren, without the Nine. Nor does he collect his strength to strike fire from the flint by the sharpness of collision, by the eagerness of his blows. He gathers roses, he steals colours from the rainbow. He lives on nectar and ambrosia. He "treads the primrose path of dalliance,” or ascends "the highest heaven of invention," or falls flat to the ground. He is nothing, if not fanciful!

I shall proceed to explain these remarks, as well as I can, by a few instances in point.

It has always appeared to me that the most perfect prose-style, the most powerful, the most dazzling, the most daring, that which went the nearest to the verge of poetry, and yet never fell over, was Burke's. It has the solidity, and sparkling effect of the diamond: all other fine writing is like French paste or Bristol-stones in the comparison. Burke's style is airy, Highty, adventurous, but it never loses sight of the subject; nay, is always in

even Bunte is not
as good
・good as Burlee

hothic

in

On the Prose Style of Poets.

9

contact with, and derives its increased or varying impulse
from it. It may be said to pass yawning gulfs “
on the
unstedfast footing of a spear:" still it has an actual
resting-place and tangible support under it—it is not
suspended on nothing. It differs from poetry, as I con-
ceive, like the chamois from the eagle: it climbs to an
almost equal height, touches upon a cloud, overlooks a
precipice, is picturesque, sublime-but all the while,
instead of soaring through the air, it stands upon a rocky
cliff, clambers up by abrupt and intricate ways, and
browzes on the roughest bark, or crops the tender flower.
The principle which guides his pen is truth, not beauty—
not pleasure, but power. He has no choice, no selection
of subject to flatter the reader's idle taste, or assist his
own fancy: he must take what comes, and make the most
of it. He works the most striking effects out of the most
unpromising materials, by the mere activity of his mind.
He rises with the lofty, descends with the mean, luxuriates
in beauty, gloats over deformity. It is all the same to
him, so that he loses no particle of the exact, character-
istic, extreme impression of the thing he writes about, and
that he communicates this to the reader, after exhausting
every possible mode of illustration, plain or abstracted,
figurative or literal. Whatever stamps the original image
more distinctly on the mind, is welcome. The nature of
his task precludes continual beauty; but it does not pre-
clude continual ingenuity, force, originality. He had to
treat of political questions, mixed modes, abstract ideas,
and his fancy (or poetry, if you will) was ingrafted on
these artificially, and as it might sometimes be thought,
violently, instead of growing naturally out of them, as it
would spring of its own accord from individual objects
and feelings. There is a resistance in the matter to the
illustration applied to it--the concrete and abstract are
hardly co-ordinate; and therefore it is that, when the first
difficulty is overcome, they must agree more closely in the

essential qualities, in order that the coincidence may be complete. Otherwise, it is good for nothing; and you justly charge the author's style with being loose, vague, flaccid, and imbecile. The poet has been said

To make us heirs

Of truth and pure delight in endless lays.

Not so the prose-writer, who always mingles clay with his gold, and often separates truth from mere pleasure. He can only arrive at the last through the first. In poetry, one pleasing or striking image obviously suggests another: the increasing the sense of beauty or grandeur is the principle of composition: in prose, the professed object is to impart conviction, and nothing can be admitted by way of ornament or relief, that does not add new force or clearness to the original conception. The two classes of ideas brought together by the orator or impassioned prosewriter, to wit, the general subject and the particular image, are so far incompatible, and the identity must be more strict, more marked, more determinate, to make them coalesce to any practical purpose. Every word should be a blow: every thought should instantly grapple with its fellow. There must be a weight, a precision, a conformity from association in the tropes and figures of animated prose to fit them to their place in the argument, and make them tell, which may be dispensed with in poetry, where there is something much more congenial between the subject-matter and the illustration

Like beauty making beautiful old rime!

What can be more remote, for instance, and at the same time more apposite, more the same, than the following comparison of the English Constitution to "the proud Keep of Windsor," in the celebrated Letter to a Noble Lord?

"Such are their ideas; such their religion, and such their law. But as to our country and our race, as long as

the well-compacted structure of our Church and State, the sanctuary, the holy of holies of that ancient law, defended by reverence, defended by power-a fortress at once and a temple1-shall stand inviolate on the brow of the British Sion; as long as the British Monarchy-not more limited than fenced by the orders of the State-shall, like the proud Keep of Windsor, rising in the majesty of proportion, and girt with the double belt of its kindred and coeval towers; as long as this awful structure shall oversee and guard the subjected land, so long the mounds and dykes of the low, fat, Bedford level will have nothing to fear from all the pickaxes of all the levellers of France. As long as our Sovereign Lord the King, and his faithful subjects, the Lords and Commons of this realm—the triple cord which no man can break; the solemn, sworn, constitutional frank-pledge of this nation; the firm guarantees of each other's being, and each other's rights; the joint and several securities, each in its place and order, for every kind, and every quality of property and of dignity-As long as these endure, so long the Duke of Bedford is safe: and we are all safe together-the high from the blights of envy and the spoliations of rapacity; the low from the iron hand of oppression and the insolent spurn of contempt. Amen! and so be it: and so it will be,

Dum domus Æneæ Capitoli immobile saxum

Accolet; imperiumque pater Romanus habebit."

Nothing can well be more impracticable to a simile than the vague and complicated idea whlch is here embodied in one; yet how finely, how nobly it stands out, in natural grandeur, in royal state, with double barriers round it to answer for its identity, with "buttress, frieze, and coigne of 'vantage" for the imagination to "make its pendant bed and procreant cradle," till the idea is confounded with the object representing it-the wonder of a kingdom; and 1 66 Templum in modum arcis."

Tacitus, of the Temple of Jerusalem.

Gothic (fran Macbethe)

Resa

then how striking, how determined the descent, “at one
fell swoop," to the "low, fat, Bedford level!" Poetry
would have been bound to maintain a certain decorum, a
regular balance between these two ideas; sterling prose
throws aside all such idle respect to appearances, and with
its pen, like a sword, "sharp and sweet," lays open the
naked truth! The poet's Muse is like a mistress, whom
we keep only while she is young and beautiful, durante
bene placito; the Muse of prose is like a wife, whom we
take during life, for better for worse. Burke's execution,
like that of all good prose, savours of the texture of what
he describes, and his pen slides or drags over the ground
of his subject, like the painter's pencil. The most rigid
fidelity and the most fanciful extravagance meet, and are
reconciled in his pages. I never pass Windsor but I
think of this passage in Burke, and hardly know to which
I am indebted most for enriching my moral sense, that or
the fine picturesque stanza in Gray,

From Windsor's heights the expanse below
Of mead, of lawn, of wood survey, &c.

I might mention that the so-much-admired description in one of the India speeches, of Hyder Ally's army (I think it is) which "now hung like a cloud upon the mountain, and now burst upon the plain like a thunderbolt," would do equally well for poetry or prose. It is a bold and striking illustration of a naturally impressive object. This is not the case with the Abbe Sieyes's far-famed "pigeon-holes," nor with the comparison of the Duke of Bedford to "the Leviathan, tumbling about his unwieldy bulk in the ocean of royal bounty." Nothing here saves the description but the force of the invective; the startling truth, the vehemence, the remoteness, the aptitude, the perfect peculiarity and coincidence of the allusion. No writer would ever have thought of it but himself; no reader can ever forget it. What is there in common, ono