haps, is that they sound a little like slang. Here there is an ungrammatical arrangement of tenses:

At last surrounds their sight

A globe of circular light

That with long beams the shamefaced night arrayed;
The helmed Cherubim,

And sworded Seraphim,

Are seen in glittering ranks with wings displayed.

-Hymn on the Nativity: Milton.

Graver instances of this fault occur, however, where, in order to produce sounds supposed to be desirable, words are used with little reference to their meanings, calculated, therefore, if interpreted literally, to convey ideas absurd or false. In this stanza, for instance, few can fail to suspect that the poet uses the word countenance because it alliterates with decorum, and contains a vowelsound that goes well with decorum and wore; that he uses ancient because it forms an assonance with raven, and also shorn and shaven, because the latter word rhymes with raven. That is to say, these words seem to be used, and the number of them might be multiplied even in this stanza, not because they are the best through which to express the sense, but on account of their sounds. Then this ebony bird, beguiling my sad fancy into smiling, By the grave and stern decorum of the countenance it wore,

"Though thy crest be shorn and shaven, thou," I said, "art sure no

craven;

Ghastly, grim, and ancient raven, wandering from the nightly shore,
Tell me what thy lordly name is on the night's Plutonian shore."

Quoth the raven, "Nevermore."

-The Raven: Poe.

Poe is given to such faults as these. Notice the incorrectness of words like fully and distinctly, as used in the following.

Yet the ear it fully knows,
By the twanging

And the clanging

How the danger ebbs and flows;

Yet the ear distinctly tells,

In the jangling

And the wrangling

How the danger sinks and swells,

By the sinking or the swelling in the anger of the bells,

Of the bells,

Of the bells, bells, bells, bells,

Bells, bells, bells,—

In the clamor and the clangor of the bells.

-The Bells.

The same fault is apparent in Swinburne, another great master of the music of verse, who occasionally allows the music to master him. Opening his Studies in Song, I turn to these stanzas. Am I to blame that, while reading them, I find myself instinctively asking: "Desire and require what? What are the daysprings of fire, and how are they beneath him? How can harps approve? What sort of an appearance could descend through dark ness to grace any thing? How does breath set free? And what possible connection can there be between most of the deeds detailed and the effects attributed to them? Of course a little reflection may enable me to make out the poet's meanings here. But they do not lie on the surface. His words do not clearly picture his thoughts. They are not distinctly representative. They are not in

the highest sense, therefore, poetic.

There are those too of mortals that love him,
There are souls that desire and require,

Be the glories of midnight above him
Or beneath him the daysprings of fire:
And their hearts are as harps that approve him,
And praise him as chords of a lyre,

That were fain with their music to move him

To meet their desire.

To descend through the darkness to grace them
Till darkness were lovelier than light:
To encompass and grasp and embrace them
Till their weakness were one with his might.
With the strength of his wings to caress them,
With the blast of his breath to set free,
With the mouths of his thunders to bless them
For sons of the sea.

-By the North Sea.

The same lack of an exact and, therefore, of a distinctly representative and graphic use of terms is apparent in words like frank, bounteous, and others too in this stanza, further on in the same poem; and why did the poet obscure his meaning by using of and for in the third line?

Rose triumphal, crowning all a city,

Roofs exalted once with prayer and psalm,

Built of holy hands for holy pity,

Frank and fruitful as a sheltering palm.

Church and hospice wrought in faultless fashion,
Hall and chancel bounteous and sublime,
Wide and sweet and glorious as compassion,
Filled and thrilled with force of choral chime.

-Idem.

It is not strange that one who has thoroughly at command the resources of the music of verse like Swinburne, or of suggestive ellipses like Browning, or of picturesque details like Morris, should occasionally, in the heat and exuberance of his creative moods, push his peculiar excellence altogether beyond the limits of legiti mate art; but it is strange that the critics who make it their business to form cool and exact estimates of literary work, should so seldom have sufficient insight to detect, or courage to reveal, wherein lie the faults that injure the

How can

style of each, and how they may be remedied. criticism be of any use except so far as in a kindly way it can aid in the perfecting of that on which it turns its scrutiny? And yet it is doubtful whether, amid all the eulogy and abuse which have greeted all the works of Robert Browning, any one, in private or in print, has ever told him plainly what those faults are all so easy to correct, but for which the man with the greatest poetic mind of the age would be-what now he is not-its greatest poet. And if criticism of this kind is needed by authors who have attained his rank, how much more by those who, with the imitative methods of inexperience, are always prone to copy unconsciously, and usually to exaggerate, the weak rather than the strong points of the masters! Many a young writer, doing this at that critical period of his life when a lack of stimulus and appreciation may wholly check one's career, has failed, notwithstanding great merits. All his ability in other directions has not compensated for his ignorance of the requirements of poetic technique. It was largely with a hope of aiding such, that this work was first conceived.

The conclusions that have been reached thus far concur in serving to prove that poetry as an art must have form, the very sounds of the single and consecutive words of which must represent the phases and movements, physical, intellectual, or emotional, of which they are supposed to be significant; and it has been shown that great poets like Shakespear, Spenser, and Milton are great masters of representative expression in this sense. It follows from these facts that no poet is artistically justified in producing effects of sound through any insertion, transposition, alteration, omission, or other use of words, that by violating the laws of grammar or lexicography obscures

the meaning. "Like the organs of seeing and hearing," says Veron, in his "Esthetics," "our intellectual powers are only able to expend a very limited amount of energy at one time. If we be called upon to expend three quarters of our mental energy in disentangling and interpreting the symbols, it is obvious that we shall have but one quarter left for the appreciation of the ideas of the poet." This statement agrees not only with the most recent deductions of physiological æsthetics, but also with those of common-sense. The test of form in every case is its fitness to represent, at least clearly, if not, as it sometimes should, brilliantly, every line and color, every phase and movement, every fact and suggestion of the ideas to be expressed. If this test be borne in mind, there can still be plenty of poetic failures from lack of poetic ideas, but no failures from a mere lack of the very easily obtained knowledge of the rudimentary principles of poetic technique.