Unwilling as I am to extend this memoir, I must give Miss Seward's criticism on the foregoing.
"The second verse of this charming elegy affords an instance of Dr. Darwin's too exclusive devotion to distinct picture in poetry; that it sometimes betrayed him into bringing objects so precisely to the eye as to lose in such precision their power of striking forcibly on the heart. The pathos in the second verse is much injured by the words 'mimic lace,' which allude to the perforated borders on the shroud. The expression is too minute for the solemnity of the subject. Certainly it cannot be natural for a shocked and agitated mind to observe, or to describe with such petty accuracy. Besides, the allusion is not sufficiently obvious. The reader pauses to consider what the poet means by 'mimic lace.' Such pauses deaden sensation and break the course of attention. A friend of the doctor's pleaded greatly that the line might run thus:—
"On her wan brow the shadowy crape was tied;"
but the alteration was rejected. Inattention to the rules of grammar in the first verse was also pointed out to him at the same time. The dream is addressed:
"Dread dream, that clasped my aching head,"
but nothing is said to it, and therefore the sense is left unfinished, while the elegy proceeds to give a picture of the lifeless beauty. The same friend suggested a change which would have remedied the defect. Thus:—
"Dread was the dream that in the midnight air
Clasped with its dusky wing my aching head,
While to" &c., &c.
"Hence not only the grammatic error would have been done away, but the grating sound produced by the near alliteration of the harsh dr in 'dread dream' removed, by placing those words at a greater distance from each other.
"This alteration was, for the same reason, rejected. The doctor would not spare the word hovering, which he said strengthened the picture; but surely the image ought not to be elaborately precise, by which a dream is transformed into an animal with black wings."[150]
Then Mrs. Pole got well, and the doctor wrote more verses and Miss Seward more criticism. It was not for nothing that Dr. Johnson came down to Lichfield.