English Critical Essays Nineteenth Century

Excerpt: ... the flocks are made to sympathize with a man’s death; or, in the Italian poet, the river flowing by the sleeping Angelica seems talking of love- Parea che l’erba le fiorisse intorno, E d’amor ragionasse quella riva! Orlando Innamorato, Canto iii. or in the voluptuous homage paid to the sleeping Imogen by the very light in the chamber, and the reaction of her own beauty upon itself; or in the ‘witch element’ of the tragedy of Macbeth and the May-day night of Faust;-Seventh, and last, that which by a single expression, apparently of the vaguest kind, not only meets but surpasses in its effect the extremest force of the most particular description; as in that exquisite passage of Coleridge’s Christabel, where the unsuspecting object of the witch’s malignity is bidden to go to bed: Quoth Christabel, So let it be! And as the lady bade, did she. Her gentle limbs did she undress, And lay down in her loveliness;- a perfect verse surely, both for feeling and music. The very smoothness and gentleness of the limbs is in the series of the letter l’s. I am aware of nothing of the kind surpassing that most lovely inclusion of physical beauty in moral, neither can I call to mind any instances of the imagination that turns accompaniments into accessories, superior to those I have alluded to. Of the class of comparison, one of the most touching (many a tear must it have drawn from parents and lovers) is in a stanza which has been copied into 308 the Friar of Orders Grey, out of Beaumont and Fletcher: Weep no more, lady, weep no more, Thy sorrow is in vain; For violets pluck’d the sweetest showers Will ne’er make grow again. And Shakespeare and Milton abound in the very grandest; such as Antony’s likening his changing fortunes to the cloud-rack; Lear’s appeal to the old age of the heavens; Satan’s appearance in the horizon, like a fleet ‘hanging in the...