25. Now it is Pushkin's great virtue that his imagination is eminently spontaneous. He seldom uses adjectives; but when he does use them, he uses such only as do actually describe something. He seldom uses similes or metaphors,--he prefers to sing of the subjects themselves, not of what they resemble; but when he does use them, the reader's imagination is able to _see_ the picture the poet had in mind, which is not often true of the English bards. Examples for comparison are innumerable; let a few suffice. Turn to Pushkin's lines, "Regret." He there regrets the days of his youth, but first tells by way of contrast what he does not regret; and his poem is simple, straightforward. Byron, however, in his "Stanzas for Music," of which Canon Farrar thought well enough to insert them in his "With the Poets," and Mr. Palgrave thinks good enough to be admitted into his "Treasury of English Poetry," finds it necessary to preface it with something like philosophical remarks, and then proceeds in this fashion:-- "Then the few whose _spirits float above the wreck of happiness_ _Are driven o'er the shoals of guilt or ocean of excess:_ _The magnet of their course is gone, or only points in vain_ _The shore to which their shivered sail shall never stretch again_. "Then _the mortal coldness of the soul_ till death itself comes down; It cannot feel for other's woes, it dare not dream it's own. _That heavy chill has frozen o'er the fountain of our tears_, And though the eye may sparkle still, 't is where the ice appears, "Oh, could I feel as I have felt, or be what I have been, Or weep as I could once have wept o'er many a vanished scene, As springs in deserts found seem sweet, all brackish though they be, _So midst the withered waste of life,_ those tears would flow to me." One must go to Shakespeare's Sonnets for poetry as false as this. Among writers with the true poetic feeling, such as Byron truly had, I know not the like of this except these. Of these twelve lines only the first two of the last stanza are _true_, are _felt;_ the rest are _made._ How are _we_, not Arabs but English-talking folk, to know the springs which in deserts found seem (_do_ they?) sweet, brackish though they be? And Byron _was_ a poet! But even a Byron cannot make a shivered sail or a coldness of a soul which is mortal, or a chill that freezes over a fountain of tears anything but mere verbiage, and verbiage moreover which instead of the intended sadness is dangerously nigh raising laughter.... 26. Again, take Longfellow's "Hymn to Night:"-- "I heard the trailing garments of the night Sweep through her marble halls! I saw her sable skirts all fringed with light From the celestial walls. . . . . . . . . . . From the cool cisterns of the midnight air, My spirit drank repose."