In the visionary hills!
No doubt my version has its faults; but it has at least the merit of consistency. Not only is a mountain more poetical than a pair of stairs, but echoes are more appropriately typified as wild beasts than as seeds; and echoes and wild beasts agree better with a mountain than does a pair of stairs with the sowing of seeds—even admitting that these seeds be seeds of fire, and be sown broadcast “among the hills” by a steep generation while in the act of tumbling down the stairs—that is to say, of coming down the stairs in too great a hurry to be capable of sowing the seeds as accurately as all seeds should be sown:—nor is the matter rendered any better for Mrs. Browning, even if the construction of her sentence be understood as implying that the fiery seeds were sown, not immediately by the steep generations that tumbled down the stairs, but mediately, through the intervention of the “supernatural thunders” that were occasioned by the steep generations that were so unlucky as to tumble down the stairs.
THE TELEGRAPH SPIRIT.
———
BY JNO. S. DU SOLLE.
———
The telegraph-wires utter, when the wind blows, certain singularly sad, yet spirited music-tones. When they pass through the leaves of a tree the effect is strangely beautiful.
Mysterious Spirit! hark! I hear thee voicing,
Up where the wind-breath woos thee, with its tone