And was admirèd much of fools, wòmen, and boys—
altered to
And was admirèd much of women, fools, and boys—
thus destroying the fine scornful emphasis on the first syllable of ‘women’! (an ungallant intimation, by the way, against the fair sex, very startling in this no less woman-loving than great poet). Any poetaster can be smooth. Smoothness abounds in all small poets, as sweetness does in the greater. Sweetness is the smoothness of grace and delicacy,—of the sympathy with the pleasing and lovely. Spenser is full of it,—Shakespeare—Beaumont and Fletcher—Coleridge. Of Spenser’s and Coleridge’s versification it is the prevailing characteristic. Its main secrets are a smooth progression between variety and sameness, and a voluptuous sense of the continuous,—‘linked sweetness long drawn out’. Observe the first and last lines of the stanza in the Faerie Queene, describing a shepherd brushing away the gnats;—the open and the close e’s in the one,
As gèntle shèpherd in swēēt ēventide—
and the repetition of the word oft, and the fall from the vowel a, into the two u’s in the other,—
She brusheth oft, and oft doth màr their mūrmŭrings.
So in his description of two substances in the handling, both equally smooth:
Each smoother seems than each, and each than each seems smoother.
An abundance of examples from his poetry will be found in the volume before us. His beauty revolves on itself with conscious loveliness. And Coleridge is worthy to be named with him, as the reader will see also, and has seen already. Let him take a sample meanwhile from the poem called the Day Dream! Observe both the variety and sameness of the vowels, and the repetition of the soft consonants: