commonalty to good thoughts; and, in general, adds to the weight of human weariness in a most woful and culpable manner. There are few thoughts likely to come across ordinary men, which have not already been expressed by greater men in the best possible way; and it is a wiser, more generous, more noble thing to remember and point out the perfect words, than to invent poorer ones, wherewith to encumber temporarily the world. Thus, when Dante describes the spirits falling from the bank of Acheron ‘as dead leaves flutter from a bough’, he gives the most perfect image possible of their utter lightness, feebleness, passiveness, and scattering agony of despair, without, however, for an instant losing his own clear perception that _these_ are souls, and _those_ are leaves; he makes no confusion of one with the other. But when Coleridge speaks of The one red leaf, the last of its clan, That dances as often as dance it can, he has a morbid, that is to say, a so far false, idea about the leaf: he fancies a life in it, and will, which there are not; confuses its powerlessness with choice, its fading death with merriment, and the wind that shakes it with music. Here, however, there is some beauty, even in the morbid passage; but take an instance in Homer and Pope. Without the knowledge of Ulysses, Elpenor, his youngest follower, has fallen from an upper chamber in the Circean palace, and has been left dead, unmissed by his leader, or companions, in the haste of their departure. They cross the sea to the Cimmerian land; and Ulysses summons the shades from Tartarus. The first which appears is that of the lost Elpenor. Ulysses, amazed, and in exactly the spirit of bitter and terrified lightness which is seen in Hamlet,[32] addresses the spirit with the simple, startled words:-- Elpenor! How camest thou under the shadowy darkness? Hast thou come faster on foot than I in my black ship? [32] ‘Well said, old mole! can’st work i’ the ground so fast?’ Which Pope renders thus:-- O, say, what angry power Elpenor led To glide in shades, and wander with the dead? How could thy soul, by realms and seas disjoined, Outfly the nimble sail, and leave the lagging wind? I sincerely hope the reader finds no pleasure here, either in the nimbleness of the sail, or the laziness of the wind! And yet how is it that these conceits are so painful now, when they have been pleasant to us in the other instances?