To the false relish of our taste
That’s worth the name of sweet?
Her minute’s pleasure’s choak’d with discontent,
Her glory soil’d with ev’ry blast—
How many dangers meet
Poor man betwixt the biggin and the winding sheet!
Hieroglyph. 3.
Tho’ I have purposely omitted pointing out many of the particular beauties of these poems, I would wish you to observe, in this last, the fine effect of compound words in which this author is so happy: also the noble swell in the third stanza—the application of his allegory to its meaning, in the fourth, where the expression so admirably suits with both “our peaceful flame, &c.”——if these are not genuine strokes of genius, I must, as a great critic says on a like occasion, acknowledge my ignorance of such subjects. I wish we had some word in our language to express the same idea in poetry as crescendo does in music; swell is applied to so many other purposes, that it has not the effect of an appropriated term.
But for the present I must quit the subject—in a little time expect the remainder of my observations on this poet.