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In the sun-light and the moon-light

Greenly sifted through the trees.

Ever wave the Eden trees,

In the night-light and the noon-light,

With a ruffling of green branches,

Shaded off to resonances,

Never stirred by rain or breeze.

The thoughts, here, belong to the highest order of poetry, it they could not have been wrought into effective expression, without the instrumentality of those repetitions — those unusual phrases — in a word, those quaintnesses, which it has been too long the fashion to censure, indiscriminately, under the one general head of “affectation.” No true poet will fail to be enraptured with the two extracts above quoted — but we believe there are few who would not find a difficulty m reconciling the psychal impossibility of refraining from admiration, with the too-hastily attained mental conviction that, critically, there is nothing to admire.

Occasionally, we meet in Miss Barrett’s poems a certain far-fetchedness of imagery, which is reprehensible m the extreme. What, for example, are we to think of

Now he hears the angel voices

Folding silence in the room? —

undoubtedly, that it is nonsense, and no more; or of

How the silence round you shivers

While our voices through it go? —

again, unquestionably, that it is nonsense, and nothing beyond.

Sometimes we are startled by knotty paradoxes; and it is nat acquitting their perpetrator of all blame on their account to admit that, in some instances, they are susceptible of solution It is ­really difficult to discover anything for approbation, in enigmas such as

That bright impassive, passive angel-hood,

or —

The silence of my heart is full of sound.

At long intervals, we are annoyed by specimens of repulsive imagery, as where the children cry:

How long, O cruel nation,

Will you stand, to move the world, on a child’s heart —

Stifle down with a mailed heel its palpitation? etc.

Now and then, too, we are confounded by a pure platitude as when Eve exclaims:

Leave us not

In agony beyond what we can bear,

And in abasement below thunder mark!

or, when the Saviour is made to say:

So, at last,

He shall look round on you with lids too straight

To hold the grateful tears.

“Strait” was, no doubt, intended, but does not materially elevate, although it slightly elucidates, the thought. A very remarkable passage is that, also, wherein Eve bids the infant voices

Hear the steep generations, how they fall

Adown the visionary stairs of Time,

Like supernatural thunders — far yet near,

Sowing their fiery echoes through the hills!

Here, saying nothing of the affectation in “adown;” not alluding to the insoluble paradox of “far yet near;” not mentioning the inconsistent metaphor involved in the “sowing of fiery echoes;” adverting but slightly to the misusage of “like,” in place of “as,” and to the impropriety of making any thing like thunder, which has never been known to fall at all; merely hinting, too, at the misapplication of “steep,” to the nations,’’ instead of to the “stairs” — a perversion in no degree to be justified by the fact that so preposterous a figure synecdoche exists in the school books; — letting these things is, for the present, we shall still find it difficult to understand how Miss Barrett should have been led to think the principal idea itself — the abstract idea — the idea of tumbling down stairs in any shape, or under any circumstances, — either a poetical or a decorous conception. ­And yet we have seen this very passage quoted as “sublime,” by a critic who seems to take it for granted, as a general rule, that Nat-Leeism is the loftiest order of literary merit. That the lines very narrowly missed sublimity, we grant; that they came within a step of it, we admit; — but, unhappily, the step is that one step which, time out of mind, has intervened between the sublime and the ridiculous. So true is this, that any person — that even with a very partial modification of the imagery — a modification that shall not interfere with its richly spiritual tone — may elevate the quotation into unexceptionability. For example: