is like nought on earth we ever read but Dean Swift's song of similes. I will prove, he says, that
A swan—
A fawn—
An artless lamb—
A hawthorn tree—
A willow—
A laburnum—
A dream—
A rainbow—
Diana—
Aurora—
A dove that singeth—
A lily,—and finally,
Venus herself!
—I in truth will prove
These are not half so fair as she I love.
Sonnet iii, p. 43.
Such heterogeneous compliments remind us of Shacabac's gallantry to Beda in Blue Beard: "Ah, you little rogue, you have a prettier mouth than an elephant, and you know it!"—A fawn-coloured countenance rivalling in fairness a laburnum blossom, seems to us a more dubious type of female beauty than even an elephant's mouth.
Love, it may be said, has carried away better poets and graver men than Mr. Moxon seems to be, into such namby-pamby nonsense; but Mr. Moxon is just as absurd in his grief or his musings, as in his love.
When he hears a nightingale—"sad Philomel!"—he concludes that the bird was originally created for no other purpose than to prophesy in Paradise the fall of man, or, as he chooses to collocate the words,
Prophetic to have mourned of man the fall,—p. 9.
but he does not tell us what she has been doing ever since.
When he sees two Cumberland streams—the Brathay and Rothay—flowing down, first to a confluence, and afterwards to the sea, he fancies "a soul-knit pair," man and wife, mingling their waters and gliding to their final haven—
in kindred love, The haven Contemplation sees above!