Do the passages describing her death and burial really possess the rhythm of poetry? That would seem to me, I confess, to be as ill a compliment as to say of a piece of poetry that it was really prose. The music of prose and of poetry are essentially different. They do not affect the ear in the same way. The one is akin to song, the other to speech. Give to prose the recurring cadences, the measure, and the rhythmic march of verse, and it becomes bad prose without becoming good poetry.[15] So, in fairness to Dickens, one is bound, as far as one can, to forget Horne's misapplied praise. But even thus, and looking upon it as prose alone, can we say that the account of Nell's funeral is, in the high artistic sense, a piece of good work. Here is an extract: "And now the bell--the bell she had so often heard, by night and day, and listened to with solemn pleasure almost as a living voice--rang its remorseless toll, for her, so young, so beautiful, so good. Decrepit age, and vigorous life, and blooming youth, and helpless infancy, poured forth--on crutches, in the pride of strength and health, in the full blush of promise, in the mere dawn of life--to gather round her tomb. Old men were there, whose eyes were dim and senses failing--grandmothers, who might have died ten years ago, and still been old,--the deaf, the blind, the lame, the palsied, the living dead in many shapes and forms, to see the closing of that earthly grave. What was the death it would shut in, to that which still could crawl and creep above it?" Such is the tone throughout, and one feels inclined to ask whether it is quite the appropriate tone in which to speak of the funeral of a child in a country churchyard? All this pomp of rhetoric seems to me--shall I say it?--as much out of place as if Nell had been buried like some great soldier or minister of state--with a hearse, all sable velvet and nodding plumes, drawn by a long train of sable steeds, and a final discharge of artillery over the grave. The verbal honours paid here to the deceased are really not much less incongruous and out of keeping. Surely in such a subject, above all others, the pathos of simplicity would have been most effective.