'Old jokes found revivified expansion?'
Where does Mr. Simms find authority for such a word as 'voicing?'—'the voicings of a bird?' In any dictionary of the English language? Guess not! As little do we admire the simile which makes a lady's eye the 'polar light in love's astrology,' or which represents it as
—'peering beneath her forehead like a star,
Bestowing a sweet glory on the sky.'
All these are 'affectations, look you;' and are in our judgment even worse sins against taste (to say nothing of truth) than the occasional instances of an opposite tendency which might be pointed out; such as 'the beast enjoying his grunt and stye;' or the coy damsel, of whom the writer says:
'One moment grows she most abruptly willing,
The next, she slaps the chaps that think of billing!'
We should not have felt ourselves justified in passing unnoticed the defects which we have indicated; the more that the following stanzas evince the ability of the writer, when he gives to natural thoughts their natural expression, to avoid these and kindred errors:
'Glancing my vision o'er the world's affairs,
Surveying this and that, of strange and common,
Its double singles and divided pairs,
Its human brutes and brutes that might be human,
All vexing life with sad and fruitless cares,
Yet all made agents of that creature, woman;
I've come to this conclusion: that 't were better
If we poor bachelors had never met her.
'Better we had not seen and could not fancy
So sad and strange conception; could not want
Her presence, nor beneath her necromancy
Feel the torn bosom and vex'd pulses pant,
With dreams and hopes that not a step advance ye
To health or happiness, but rather daunt,
At each impassion'd move, the weary spirit,
That sees the joy receding as we near it.
'Better in single blessedness had Adam,
Stout father-farmer, in his garden trod;
Unvexed by daily strife with maid or madam,
And free to eat his fruit and meet his God:
I'm sure his fate had not been half so sad—am
Certain he had not then been thrust abroad
With breeches made of fig-leaves, quickly rended,
More quickly than his wife could get them mended.
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