thus destroying the fine scornful emphasis on the first syllable of ‘women’! (an ungallant intimation, by the way, against the fair sex, very startling in this no less woman-loving than great poet). Any poetaster can be smooth. Smoothness abounds in all small poets, as sweetness does in the greater. Sweetness is the smoothness of grace and delicacy,--of the sympathy with the pleasing and lovely. Spenser is full of it,--Shakespeare--Beaumont and Fletcher--Coleridge. Of Spenser’s and Coleridge’s versification it is the prevailing characteristic. Its main secrets are a smooth progression between variety and sameness, and a voluptuous sense of the continuous,--‘linked sweetness long drawn out’. Observe the first and last lines of the stanza in the _Faerie Queene_, describing a shepherd brushing away the gnats;--the open and the close _e’s_ in the one, As gèntle shèpherd in swēēt ēventide-- and the repetition of the word _oft_, and the fall from the vowel _a_, into the two _u’s_ in the other,-- She brusheth _oft_, and _oft_ doth màr their mūrmŭrings. So in his description of two substances in the handling, both equally smooth: _Each smoother seems than each, and each than each seems smoother._ An abundance of examples from his poetry will be found in the volume before us. His beauty revolves on itself with conscious loveliness. And Coleridge is worthy to be named with him, as the reader will see also, and has seen already. Let him take a sample meanwhile from the poem called the _Day Dream_! Observe both the variety and sameness of the vowels, and the repetition of the soft consonants: My eyes make pictures when they’re shut:-- I see a fountain, large and fair, A willow and a ruin’d hut, And _thee_ and _me_ and Mary there. _O Mary! make thy gentle lap our pillow; Bend o’er us, like a bower, my beautiful green willow._ By _Straightforwardness_ is meant the flow of words, in their natural order, free alike from mere prose, and from those inversions to which bad poets recur in order to escape the charge of prose, but chiefly to accommodate their rhymes. In Shadwell’s play of _Psyche_, Venus gives the sisters of the heroine an answer, of which the following is the _entire_ substance, literally, in so many words. The author had nothing better for her to say: I receive your prayers with kindness, and will give success to your hopes. I have seen, with anger, mankind adore your sister’s beauty and deplore her scorn: which they shall do no more. For I’ll so resent their idolatry, as shall content your wishes to the full. Now in default of all imagination, fancy, and expression, how was the writer to turn these words into poetry or rhyme? Simply by diverting them from their natural order, and twisting the halves of the sentences each before the other.