Clearly was felt, or down the leaves laughed through.”
And so on—executed with ever so much of delicacy—but not a sign or a symbol of the grave and melancholy tone which should equip, even to the utmost hem of its descriptive passages, that tragic story of Dante.
Those deft, little feathery touches—about deer, and birds, and leafy houses, are not scored with the seriousness which in every line and pause should be married with the intensity of the story. The painting of Mr. Watts, of the dead Francesca—ghastly though it be—has more in it to float one out into the awful current of Dante’s story than a world of the happy wordy meshes of Mr. Hunt. A greater master would have brought in, maybe, all those natural beauties of the landscape—the woods, the fountains, the clear heaven—but they would all have been toned down to the low, tragic movement, which threatens, and creeps on and on, and which dims even the blue sky with forecast of its controlling gloom.
There is no such inaptness or inadequacy where Leigh Hunt writes of crickets and grasshoppers and musical boxes. In his version of the old classic story of “Hero and Leander,” however, the impertinence (if I may be pardoned the language) of his dainty wordy dexterities is even more strikingly apparent. His Hero, waiting for her Leander, beside the Hellespont,
“Tries some work, forgets it, and thinks on,
Wishing with perfect love the time were gone,
And lost to the green trees with their sweet singers,
Taps on the casement-ledge with idle fingers.”
No—this is not a Greek maiden listening for the surge of the water before the stalwart swimmer of Abydos; it is a London girl, whom the poet has seen in a second-story back window, meditating what color she shall put to the trimming of her Sunday gown!