palpably from the real matter of the thought to the inorganic manner of the interpretative effort to declare it.

Next below Conceits comes Marinistic diction, which produces effects of a purely sensational character, sometimes with no least trace of ulterior or contributive meaning. We are generally reminded of Dryden's Upon the Death of Lord Hastings, or Cowley's Mistress, whenever Marinism is mentioned. Conceits border close on Marinism, but are usually distinguishable by their cold and glittering intellectual quality. Young's suggestion of stars as seal rings upon the fingers of the Almighty is properly a conceit, yet from the rank sensationalism of the idea, must be accounted Marinistic. Tennyson is nowhere chargeable with locutions so extravagant.

Some critics and many readers are confused as to the distinction between certain lower forms of interpretative expression, and the lowest of all, which we have called Phrasing. It requires more than ordinary penetration, or at least unusual training, to discriminate immediately and unerringly in such matters. There are men who would denounce" a dressy literature, an exaggerated literature, and a highly ornamented, not to say a meretricious style," meaning almost specifically such work of Tennyson's as exhibits his best interpretative technique, and yet would apparently praise lines like these from Wordsworth (The Excursion, Book IV.):—

I have seen

A curious child, who dwelt upon a tract
Of inland ground, applying to his ear
The convolutions of a smooth-lipp'd shell.

Here the italic portions are manifestly nothing but phrasing, and phrasing of a pestilently effeminate sort.

There

are seemingly but three kinds of phrasing possible, the Brainless, the Pedantic, and the Ironic or Burlesque. The first species is illustrated in such lisping and affected refinements of speech as the dude's residence (rethidenth') for the good and gloriously adequate Anglo-Saxon home. Whatever faults of touch Tennyson may finally be adjudged to have committed, he is certainly never afraid to utter prose with drastic plainness when he has nothing better than prose to say. He could nowhere, even in his callowest days, have written "dwelling on a tract of inland ground," when the meaning was to be merely inland born or reared. Wordsworth's last line,

The convolutions of a smooth-lipp'd shell,

is a more endurable instance of phrasing proper, yet carries upon its face sufficient evidence of its inorganic quality. Of course Wordsworth merely wants to indicate to us a particular kind of shell, and not at all what the shell is or means. An extended expression of this kind is legitimate when truly interpretative of some recondite. spiritual meaning, but never when the purpose is solely, as here, to identify an object to the reader's mind. We are then reluctantly forced to set Wordsworth's lines just quoted in the lowest rank of phrasing. Not that Wordsworth was puerile, as many of his earliest critics opined and declared. He simply lacked the power of virile conception and of strenuous diction, seen so typically in Browning, hence sometimes, as in Peter Bell, wrote deliberately below his level.

The second, and next higher sort of phrasing, is not found much in literature of these days. Now and then we hear a college fledgling talk somewhat in the pedantic

never

vein. The good sense of the English-speaking race revolted from it betimes. Tennyson frequently shows signs of his classical training, but seldom or phrases in units so high as the clause or line. random, and we are likely to find minor expressions such as these:

That clad her like an April daffodilly;

Her maiden-babe, a double April old;

Open at

Thro' stately theatres, benched crescent-wise ;
Nor those horn-handed breakers of the glebe;
Melissa shook her doubtful curls.

But, in judging cases of this kind, we must take care to distinguish utterances which do not represent Tennyson, but are put in to characterize some mind or mood of his creating, from such as he himself would use. Thus, the lines some time since quoted from The Princess,—

Then, ere the silver sickle of that month
Became her golden shield,

were pretty surely intended to give the hint, along with the ringlets and weird seizures earlier, of the Prince's effeminacy and sentimentalism, which are arbitrarily altered before Canto VII. is reached,—at the opening of Again, the Princess's phrasing in

the poem.

There sinks the nebulous star we call the sun,

is surely not to be taken as other than symptomatic of new and undigested learning, sought after not for itself, but for the sake of the accomplishment and power of its possession.

As an example of Ironic or Burlesque phrasing, Pope's Song by a Person of Quality may be instanced. We shall remember that this poem has from the first been conned

soberly, by many readers, without discovery of its mocking Two stanzas from it will be sufficient here:

purpose.

Fluttering spread thy purple pinions,

Gentle Cupid, o'er my heart,

I a slave in thy dominions;
Nature must give way to art.
Mild Arcadians, ever blooming,
Nightly nodding o'er your flocks,
See my weary days consuming

All beneath yon flowery rocks.

The last two lines, taken in conjunction, should have. always betrayed the character of the whole. The unit' here is the whole poem; or, more correctly, the first two stanzas comprise one burden of nonsense, and each of the remaining makes up another. To compare with this an effort in which the unit is reduced to the single line, I shall quote the following supreme illustration from I know not what master of literary irony:

The light resounds across the hills,
The crumbling dew-drops fall,

The rippling rock the moonbeam fills,
-The starlight spreads its pall.

Now gleams the ruddy sound afar,
The evening zephyrs glow,
While from the lake a crimson star
Sparkles like summer snow.

The beams of circumambient night
Have wrapped their shadows round,

And deep-toned darkness fills the sight

Of all the world profound.

Very evidently all such masterpieces of burlesque are inspired by the desire to satirize, by exaggeration, the evil

of subordinating and sacrificing sense to sound.

Much

of the first work of versifiers calls for no less drastic

remedy.

There are, then, including the literal or fact mode, eight denominations of literary values; and there seem to be no other generic ones besides these eight. We will leave the discussion of poetic diction here with two observations, either of which is sufficient for another introduction to a poem like The Princess. We must have new truth continually, fresh revealments of the Infinite Knowledge, as of the Infinite Beauty that is beyond. Since the world began, the inspiration of seership has not ceased nor the revelation of the Beautiful been denied. We hear men making inquiry of one another whether poetry shall not fail. It will fail when new knowledge ceases to come into the consciousness of Without this increase society would perish. We cannot be edified with merely the music, the art, the literature of our fathers. Again, the spiritual life can never consist solely in reading and realizing the revelatory and interpretative ideas of others. We must be ourselves seers and interpreters, in our degree, if we would live indeed. Diligent study of the manner if not the matter of the poem now in hand will contribute not a little to this end.

men.