Various

“ What more beautiful than a well-contrived dance? You see there the united design of many persons to make up one figure: after they have separated themselves in many petty divisions, they rejoin one by one into a group: the confederacy is plain among them, for chance could never produce any thing so beautiful, and yet there is nothing in it that shocks your sight. True, then, the hand of wit appears in repartee, as it must in all kinds of verse. When, with the quiet and poignant brevity of it, there mingles the cadency and sweetness of verse—"the soul of the hearer has nothing more to desire." ”

“ To use a commonplace simile, gentle reader, woman's beauty is like champagne, it gets terribly into a man's head: do not, however, leave the cork out of your champagne bottle—the sparkling spirit will all evaporate; and do not quarrel with your sweet-heart if she muffles up her face sometimes, and will not let you look at it for a week together—her eyes will be all the brighter when you next see them. There is a good cause for it; man is an ungrateful, hardly-pleased animal; every indulgence that woman grants him loosens her power over him. Women have an innate right to conceal their heads! ”

“ The natural and supernatural are united—when Achilles is half of mortal, half of immortal derivation; when heavenly coursers are yoked in the chariots of men; when Juno, for a moment, grants voice to the horse of Achilles; and the horse, whom Achilles has unjustly reproved, answers prophesying the death of the hero.
Why Homer made the Iliad in hexameters, no man can tell; but having done so, he thereby constituted for ever the proper metre of Greek—and Latin—Epic poetry. But what a multitude of subjects, how different from one another does that, and every other Epic poem, comprehend! ”

“ The music of versification has endless varieties of measures, and rhyme lends enchantment to them all. Not an affection, emotion, or passion of the soul that may not be soothed by its syllablings, enkindled, or raised to rapture. Pity and terror, joy and grief, love and devotion, are all alike sensible of its influence; as the sweet similarities keep echoing through some artful strain, that all the while is thought by them who listen to come in simplicity from the unpremeditating heart. Songs, hymns, elegies, epicedia, epithalamia—rhyme rules alike all the shadowy tribes. ”

“ Death, indeed, were a gentler fate than desertion. Truth to say, Goethe would have made but a sorry Romeo, for he wanted the great and leading virtue of constancy; and yet who can tell what Romeo might have become, after six months' exile in Mantua? Juliet, we know, had taken the place of Rosaline. Might not some fairer and newer star have arisen to eclipse the image of the other? We will not credit the heresy. Far better that the curtain should fall upon the dying lovers, before one shadow of doubt or suspicion of infidelity has arisen to perplex the clear bright mirror of their souls! ”

“ But Dante's Purgatory, and Hell, and Heaven, are in rhyme—ay, and in difficult rhyme, too—terza rima. Yet the damned speak it naturally—so do the blessed. How dreadful from Ugolino, how beautiful from Beatrice!
But the drama—the drama—the drama—is your cry—what say we to the drama? Listen, and you shall hear—
The Tragic Drama rose at Athens. The splendid and inexhaustible mythology of gods and heroes, which had supplied the Epic Muse with the materials of her magnificent relations, furnished the matter of a new species of poetry. ”

“ Therefore, let not Shakspeare suffer for our sakes; it is our fault, who succeed him in an age that is more refined, if we imitate him so ill that we copy his failings only, and make a virtue of that in our writings which in his was an imperfection.
"For what remains, the excellency of that poet was, as I have said, in the more manly passions; Fletcher's in the softer. Shakspeare writ better betwixt man and man; Fletcher betwixt man and woman: consequently the one described friendship better—the other love. Yet Shakspeare taught Fletcher to write love; and Juliet and Desdemona are originals. ”

“ D'Avenant's astonishing "Siege of Rhodes"—formerly declared to be the beau-idéal of an heroic play—was after all, it seems, wanting in fulness of plot, variety of character, and even beauty of style. Above all, it was not sufficiently great and majestic. He knew not, honest man, that, in a true heroic play, you ought to draw all things as far above the ordinary proportion of the stage, as that is beyond the common words and actions of human life. ”

“ NORTH'S SPECIMENS OF THE BRITISH CRITICS. Dryden.
Poetry, according to Lord Bacon a Third Part of Learning, must be a social interest of momentous power. That Wisest of Men—so our dear friends may have heard—extols it above history and above philosophy, as the more divine in its origin, the more immediately and intimately salutary and sanative in its use. Are not Shakspeare and Milton two of our greatest moral teachers? Criticism opens to us the poetry we possess; and, like a magnanimous kingly protector, shelters and fosters all its springing growths. What is criticism as a science? ”

“ Murat's personal intrepidity, and even his fanfaronade, excited an interest for him in Europe. But he was a wild, rash, and reckless instrument of Napoleon's furious and remorseless policy; the commandant of the French army in Spain in 1808 could not complain of military vengeance; and his death by the hands of the royal troops only relieved Europe of the boldest disturber among the fallen followers of the great usurper.
The finest view of Naples is the one which the mob of tourists see the last. Its approaches by land are all imperfect—the city is to be seen only from the bay. ”

“ Beyond all doubt there might arise in rhyme a most beautiful romantic drama. Unreal infused into real, turns real at once into poetry. But this is of all degrees. In the lowest prose of life there is an infusion which we overlook. We should drop down dead without it. Let the unreal a little predominate; and now we become sensible to its presence, and now we call the compound poetry. Let it be an affair of words, and we require verse as the fitting form. ”

“ Her costume is completed by trousers of silk gauze, and yellow morocco boots, which reach a considerable way up the legs. How any human being can bear such a heap of clothing, especially under the fiery sun and hot winds of Egypt, is to us inconceivable. It must melt all vigour out of the body, and all life out of the soul; but it is the fashion, and fashion works its wonders in Egypt as well as elsewhere. The veil across the mouth, in a climate where every breath of fresh air is precious, must be but a slower kind of strangulation. ”

“ Wit and language, and humour also, in some measure, we had before him; but something of art was wanting to the drama till he came. He managed his strength to more advantage than any who succeeded him. You seldom find him making love in any of his scenes, or endeavouring to move the passions; his genius was too sullen and saturnine to do it gracefully, especially when he knew he came after those who had performed both to such an height. Humour was his proper sphere, and in that he delighted most to represent mechanic people. ”

“ And have we not therefore taken into our service a parcel of idlers, of whom thou art the chief, and whose duty it is to read and think for the whole of our people?"
"And why should the Light of the World read?" replied the mollah after a respectful pause. "He who is already the source of all earthly wisdom, the joy and admiration of all nations? How shall I express my wonder—how shall I sufficiently praise his high qualities?"—
"Stop, mollah!" cried the Caliph. "Know that it does not please us to be praised or wondered at by such as thou. ”

“ Greatest minds are those in which, in and out of poetry, the understanding contemplates the will. Then first the soul has its proper strength. Disorderly passions are then tamed, and become the massy pillars of high-built virtue. Criticism? It is a shape of self-intuition. Confession and penitence, in the church, are a moral and a religious criticism. The imagination is less august and solemn, but of the same character. The first age of the world lived by divine instincts; the later must by reason. How, then, shall we possess the poetry of our being, unless we guard and arm it? ”

“ In reasoning on a subject, we can use only those lights which experience has given us. The efficacy of logical disproof, somewhat contemptuously treated by Mr Townshend in the above passage, is yet fully vindicated by the latter half of the book itself, which is an endeavour, logically, to bring home mesmerism to the understanding of men of experience. It is vain to make light of logic, when the parties who set it at nought are themselves obliged to use it to prove its own worthlessness. You must not exalt reason, and we will give you the reason why—this cuts their own ground from under them. ”

“ Has there not been for half a century a spontaneous, an ardent, a loving return in literature, of our own and all countries, to the old and great in the productions of the human mind—to nature, with all her fountains? Does not the spirit of man, in the great civilized nations at this day, travail with desire of knowing itself, its laws, its conditions, its means, its powers, its hopes? ”

“ A foremost characteristic of nature is infinite and infinitely various production, expressing or intimating an indefatigably and inexhaustibly active spirit. But such a spirit of life, so acting and producing, appears to us as a fountain, ever freshly flowing from the very hand of God. All that Shakspeare's drama images; and thus his art appears to us, as always the highest art appears to us to be, a Divine thing. The musical forms of his language should answer; and they do. They are; first, prose; second, loose blank verse; third, tied blank verse; fourth, rhyme. ”

“ The orange-coloured waters, the strong effluvium of the waves intoxicating the brain, the wild headlands of Africa—each the dwelling of a necromancer—the Maldives, filled with mermaids and sea-monsters, the volcanic blaze that guarded the entrance to the Red Sea, the fiery mountains of Aden, the Hadramant, or region of Death, the Babelmandeb, or Gate of Tears, the Isle of Perim, and the Cape of Burials, wild, black, and terrific—fill the Arab imagination with wonders that throw all modern invention to an immeasurable distance. ”

“ But it must not be forgotten that the question regards the nature of a Serious Play, which is indeed the representation of nature, but nature wrought up to an high pitch. The plot, the characters, the wit, the passions, the descriptions, are all exalted above the level of common converse, as high as the imagination of the poet can carry them, with proportion to verisimility. Tragedy is wont to image to us the minds and fortunes of noble persons; and to portray these exactly, heroic rhyme is nearest nature, as being the noblest kind of modern verse. ”

“ The stage trodden by living feet, the scenery, voices from human tongues varying with all the changes of emotion, impassioned gestures, and events no longer spoken of, but transacted in presence, before the eyes of the audience, are elements full of power, that claim for tragedy and impose upon it a character of its own. The heart is more interested, and the imagination less. Persons who accompany the whole business that is to be done, with speaking—a poem consisting of incessant dialogue—must disclose, with more precise and profounder discovery, the minds represented as engaged. ”

“ Glory to the hexameter! it suits them all. Now, in every Epic poem, and in few more than in the Iliad, there are many dramatic scenes. But in the Greek tragic drama, the dialogue is mainly in iambics; for this reason, that iambics are naturally suited for the language of conversation. Be it so. Yet here in the Epic, the dialogue is felt to be as natural in hexameters as the heart of man can desire. Hear Agamemnon and Achilles. Call to mind that colloquy in Pelides' tent.
Rhyme is unknown in Greek; and it is of rhyme that we are treating, though you may not see our drift. ”

“ They, too, are Epic poets who have charmed the world. Their poems may not have such a sweep as the Iliad, still their sweep is great. Rich in rhyme is their language—rich the stanza they delighted in—ottava rima, how rich the name! Is rhyme unnatural from the lips of their peers and paladins? No—an inspired speech. Is hexameter blank verse alone fit for the mouths of Greek heroes—eight-line stanzas of oft-recurring rhymes for the mouths of Italian? ”