expression in many nations. It abounds in Arabic poetry, and its present prevalence with us may perhaps be traced partly from the Arabic school, through the Sicilian, Provençal, and Italian poets, and partly from the old Latin hymns.

Arthur Hallam, the Arthur of "In Memoriam,” tells us that" Rhyme has been said to contain in itself a constant appeal to the memory and to hope." It is an expression worth remembering. We look forward with hope to the coming rhyme, we connect it with the past rhyme by memory.

CHAPTER III.

SOME CHARACTERISTICS OF ANCIENT AND
MODERN ART.

BEFORE beginning the subject of this chapter, I should like to add a few words in illustration of what has already been said on the essential difference between poetry and the loosely termed pictorial arts—painting and sculpture,—and to touch on the question of the Tone-art.

I said that in mere description, in imitating a form at one fixed point in its period of existence-to use Wordsworth's expression, at "one brief moment caught from fleeting time"-that in this, poetry abandons her own special powers, and invades the realm of the pictorial arts. In order to prove that this imitation is a false object for poetry, we cannot possibly have a more conclusive testimony than the fact that in such cases poetry, feeling her own incapability, summons to her aid her sister art. Lessing gives us one or two examples of this—to which I will add a few that I have stumbled across

First, I will freely translate an ode of the Greek poet Anacreon, in which he gives a description of his lady's beauty-an ode which Ariosto seems to me to have copied rather closely, indeed almost translated, in his description of Alcina. Both Anacreon and Ariosto begin by appealing to a painter for help. "Her shape is of such perfect symmetry as best to feign th' industrious painter knows"—thus begins Ariosto. And Anacreon in the same manner: "Best of painters," he says, "paint me my absent lady, as I shall bid thee. First paint her hair, soft and black; and, if thy image can effect it, paint me it scented with myrrh. And paint beneath the dark locks her ivory brow; and from between her eyebrows let the nose descend in a gently sloping line, unbroken yet not straight; and let thy picture have, as she too has, dark arched eyebrows that meet and mingle imperceptibly. and paint her nostril and her cheek by mixing roses with the milk." But all is in vain-all this most vivid and luscious word-colouring is futile; and, suddenly breaking loose from the painter and his colours and forms, poetry, "like a cloud of fire," soars up once more into her native element, that of imagination,-"Around her alabaster neck," the poet exclaims, utterly regardless of the poor painter, "let all the graces flit." "Stop! stop!" he cries at last, as if dismissing the artist from his useless task—“stop! for I see her-her very self! O image, thou wilt speak to me directly!" The poet has by imagination

G

summoned up, not a mere coloured picture of her, but her very self, his own sweet mistress, the living, speaking, loving reality itself. It is the story of Pygmalion's image realized.

In another ode Anacreon endeavours to describe his favourite Bathyllus in the same way, by the aid of a painter, who is to copy the most beautiful limbs from pictures and sculptures of various gods—till all these various things of beauty should "stand starlike around" and gather into one godlike form. As another example, take Dante's exclamation when he wishes to describe a quiescent object—a man in the most quiescent state possible, except that of death itself, namely, in a deep sleep: "Had I the power to pourtray how Argus was charmed to sleep by the pipe of Mercury, as a painter who paints with a model would I design how I was lulled asleep."

Once more, a passage from Byron :—

"Her head hung down, and her long hair in stooping
Concealed her features better than a veil :

And one hand o'er the ottoman lay drooping,
White, waxen, and as alabaster pale.
Would that I were a painter! to be grouping

All that a poet drags into detail !

Oh that my words were colours! but their tints
May serve perhaps as outlines or slight hints."

The very epithets best chosen by a poet to describe the distinct form and vivid colouring of a thing in a state of immobility—and such a description may legi

timately be used as poetic material—such epithets are drawn from the sister art. I need only quote one passage to prove this:

On the other hand, when poetry, trusting in her own powers alone, undertakes to describe works of pictorial art, she instinctively transmutes them into her peculiar forms; endows them with life and motion: as we have already seen in the case of Anacreon. Leaving the mere material shape, she introduces, in order to create her poetic entirety, thoughts and scenes beyond even the suggestion of a picture or a statue. For instance, the statue of the dying gladiator or Gaul, as a statue, contains everything in its mere marble form as it lies before us; but see how the poet breaks the fetters of time and space to body forth the idea in a poetic form :—

"The arena swims around him-he is gone

Ere ceased the inhuman shout which hailed the wretch who won.

He heard it, but he heeded not-his eyes
Were with his heart, and that was far away :
He recked not of the life he lost, nor prize,
But where his rude hut by the Danube lay,
There were his young barbarians all at play,
There was their Dacian mother-he, their sire,
Butchered to make a Roman holiday,—

All this rushed with his blood. Shall he expire
And unavenged! Arise, ye Goths, and glut your ire ! "