ever pretended to understand in plain prose, and which, when solar-microscoped into poetry upon the model of the Greek drama," is about as convincing as the Egyptian Lectures of Mr. Silk Buckingham — about as much to any purpose under the sun as the hi presto! conjurations of Signor Blitz. What are we to make, for example, of dramatic colloquy such as this?— the words are those of a Chorus of Invisible Angels addressing Adam:

Live, work on, O Earthy!
By the Actual's tension
Speed the arrow worthy
Of a pure ascension.

From the low earth round you
Reach the heights above you;
From the stripes that wound you
Seek the loves that love

you !
God's divinest burneth plain
Through the crystal diaphane

Of our loves that love you.

Now we do not mean to assert that, by excessive "tension" of the intellect, a reader accustomed to the cant of the transcendentalists (or of those who degrade an ennobling philosophy by styling themselves such) may not succeed in ferretting from the passage quoted, and indeed from each of the thousand similar ones throughout the book, something that shall bear the aspect of an absolute idea but we do mean to say first, that in nine cases out of ten, the thought when dug out will be found very poorly to repay the labor of the digging for it is the nature of thought in general, as it is the nature of some ores in particular, to be richest when most superficial. And we do mean

;

to say, secondly, that, in nineteen cases out of twenty, the reader will suffer the most valuable ore to remain unmined to all eternity, before he will be put to the trouble of digging for it one inch. And we do mean to assert, thirdly, that no reader is to be condemned for not putting himself to the trouble of digging even the one inch; for no writer has the right to impose any such necessity upon him. What is worth thinking is distinctly thought: what is distinctly thought, can and should be distinctly expressed, or should not be expressed at all. Nevertheless, there is no more appropriate opportunity than the and maintaining, at once, what either maintained or admitted

present for admitting has never before been that there is a justifia

It

not

ble exception to the rule for which we contend. is where the design is to convey the fantastic the obscure. To give the idea of the latter we need, as in general, the most precise and definite terms, and those who employ other terms but confound obscurity of expression with the expression of obscurity. The fantastic in itself, however, phantasm may be materially furthered in its development by the quaint in phraseology: a proposition which any moralist may examine at his leisure for himself.

The Drama of Exile opens with a very palpable bull:"Scene, the outer side of the gate of Eden, shut fast with clouds [a scene out of sight!] "from the depth of which revolves the sword of fire, self-moved. A watch of innumerable angels rank above rank, slopes up from around it to the zenith; and the glare cast from their brightness and from the sword, extends many miles into the wilderness. Adam and Eve are seen in the distance, flying along the glare. The angel Gabriel and Lucifer

are beside the gate." These are the " stage directions which greet us on the threshold of the book. We complain first of the bull: secondly, of the bluefire melo-dramatic aspect of the revolving sword; thirdly, of the duplicate nature of the sword, which, if steel, and sufficiently enflamed to do service in burning, would, perhaps, have been in no temper to cut ; and on the other hand, if sufficiently cool to have an edge, would have accomplished little in the way of scorching a personage so well accustomed to fire and brimstone and all that, as we have very good reason to believe Lucifer was. We cannot help objecting, too, to the innumerable angels," as a force altogether disproportioned to the one enemy to be kept out: either the self-moving sword itself, we think, or the angel Gabriel alone, or five or six of the innumerable" angels, would have sufficed to keep the devil (or is it Adam?) outside of the gate - which, after all, he might not have been able to discover, on account of the clouds.

Far be it from us, however, to dwell irreverently on matters which have venerability in the faith or in the fancy of Miss Barrett. We allude to these niaiseries at all found here in the very first paragraph of her poem, simply by way of putting in the clearest light the mass of inconsistency and antagonism in which her subject has inextricably involved her. She has made allusion to Milton, and no doubt felt secure in her theme (as a theme merely) when she considered his Paradise Lost." But even in Milton's own day, when men had the habit of believing all things, the more nonsensical the more readily, and of worshipping, in blind acquiescence, the most preposterous of impossibilities even then, there were not

wanting individuals who would have read the great epic with more zest, could it have been explained to their satisfaction, how and why it was, not only that a snake quoted Aristotle's ethics, and behaved otherwise pretty much as he pleased, but that bloody battles were continually being fought between bloodless innumerable angels,' "that found no inconvenience in losing a wing one minute and a head the next, and if pounded up into puff-paste late in the afternoon, were as good "innumerable angels as new the next morning, in time to be at réveillé roll-call: And now present epoch there are few people who do not occasionally think. This is emphatically the thinking age; indeed it may very well be questioned whether mankind ever substantially thought before.

at the

The fact is, if the Paradise Lost were written to-day (assuming that it had never been written when it was,) not even its eminent, although over-estimated merits, would counterbalance, either in the public view, or in the opinion of any critic at once intelligent and honest, the multitudinous incongruities which are part and parcel of its plot.

But in the plot of the drama of Miss Barrett it is something even worse than incongruity which affronts : a continuous mystical strain of ill-fitting and exaggerated allegory-if, indeed, allegory is not much too respectable a term for it. We are called upon, for example, to sympathise in the whimsical woes of two Spirits, who, upspringing from the bowels of the earth, set immediately to bewailing their miseries in jargon such as this:

I am the spirit of the harmless earth;

God spake me softly out among the stars,

As softly as a blessing of much worth

And then his smile did follow unawares,

That all things, fashioned, so, for use and duty,
Might shine anointed with his chrism of beauty —
Yet I wail!

I drave on with the worlds exultingly,
Obliquely down the Godlight's gradual fall-
Individual aspect and complexity

Of gyratory orb and interval,

Lost in the fluent motion of delight

Toward the high ends of Being, beyond Sight -
Yet I wail!

Innumerable other spirits discourse successively after the same fashion, each ending every stanza of his lamentation with the "yet I wail !" When at length they have fairly made an end, Eve touches Adam upon the elbow, and hazards, also, the profound and pathetic observation 66 Lo, Adam, they wail!" which is nothing more than the simple truth for they do and God deliver us from any such wailing again!

It is not our purpose, however, to demonstrate what every reader of these volumes will have readily seen selfdemonstrated the utter indefensibility of "The Drama of Exile," considered uniquely, as a work of art. We have none of us to be told that a medley of metaphysical recitatives sung out of tune, at Adam and Eve, by all manner of inconceivable abstractions, is not exactly the best material for a poem. Still it may very well happen that among this material individual passages of great beauty.

there shall be

But should any

one doubt the possibility, let him be satisfied by a single extract such as follows: