Now 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 fall like _thunder_, which has never been known to fall at all; merely hinting, too, at the misapplication of “steep” to the “generations” instead of to the “stairs”—(a perversion in no degree justified by the fact that so preposterous a figure as _synecdoche_ exists in the school-books:)—letting these things pass, we shall still find it difficult to understand how Mrs. Browning 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 Mr. Whipple speaks of it as “sublime.” That the lines narrowly _missed_ sublimity, I grant:—that they came within a step of it, I 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 I—with a very partial modification of the imagery—a modification that shall not interfere with its richly spiritual _tone_—may elevate the passage into unexceptionability. For example: Hear the far generations—how they crash From crag to crag down the precipitous Time, In multitudinous thunders that upstartle Aghast, the echoes from their cavernous lairs In the visionary hills! No doubt my version has its faults; but it has at least the merit of consistency. Not only is a mountain more poetical than a pair of stairs, but echoes are more appropriately typified as wild beasts than as seeds; and echoes and wild beasts agree better with a mountain than does a pair of stairs with the _sowing_ of seeds—even admitting that these seeds be seeds of fire, and be sown broadcast “among the hills” by a steep generation while in the act of tumbling down the stairs—that is to say, of coming down the stairs in too great a hurry to be capable of sowing the seeds as accurately as all seeds should be sown:—nor is the matter rendered any better for Mrs. Browning, even if the construction of her sentence be understood as implying that the fiery seeds were sown, not immediately by the steep generations that tumbled down the stairs, but mediately, through the intervention of the “supernatural thunders” that were _occasioned_ by the steep generations that were so unlucky as to tumble down the stairs. * * * * * THE TELEGRAPH SPIRIT. BY JNO. S. DU SOLLE. The telegraph-wires utter, when the wind blows, certain singularly sad, yet spirited music-tones. When they pass through the leaves of a tree the effect is strangely beautiful.