There is Ideality in these lines--but except in the case of the words italicized--it is Ideality _not of a high order_. We have it is true, a collection of natural {333} objects, each individually of great beauty, and, if actually seen as in nature, capable of exciting in any mind, through the means of the Poetic Sentiment more or less inherent in all, a certain sense of the beautiful. But to view such natural objects as they exist, and to behold them through the medium of words, are different things. Let us pursue the idea that such a collection as we have here will produce, of necessity, the Poetic Sentiment, and we may as well make up our minds to believe that a catalogue of such expressions as moon, sky, trees, rivers, mountains &c., shall be capable of exciting it,--it is merely an extension of the principle. But in the line "the earth is dark, _but_ the heavens are bright" besides the simple mention of the "dark earth" and the "bright heaven," we have, directly, the moral sentiment of the brightness of the sky compensating for the darkness of the earth--and thus, indirectly, of the happiness of a future state compensating for the miseries of a present. All this is effected by the simple introduction of the word _but_ between the "dark heaven" and the "bright earth"--this introduction, however, was prompted by the Poetic Sentiment, and by the Poetic Sentiment alone. The case is analogous in the expression "glimmers and dies," where the imagination is exalted by the moral sentiment of beauty heightened in dissolution. In one or two shorter passages of the _Culprit Fay_ the poet will recognize the purely ideal, and be able at a glance to distinguish it from that baser alloy upon which we have descanted. We give them without farther comment. The winds _are whist_, and the owl is still The bat in the shelvy rock _is hid_ And naught is heard on the _lonely_ hill But the cricket's chirp and the answer _shrill_ Of the gauze-winged katy-did; And the plaint of the _wailing_ whippoorwill Who mourns _unseen_, and ceaseless sings Ever a note of wail and wo-- Up to the vaulted firmament His path the fire-fly courser bent, And at every gallop on the wind _He flung a glittering spark behind_. He blessed the force of the charmed line, And he banned the water-goblins' spite, For he saw around _in the sweet moonshine, Their little wee faces above the brine, Giggling and laughing with all their might_ At the piteous hap of the Fairy wight. The poem "_To a Friend_" consists of fourteen Spenserian stanzas. They are fine spirited verses, and probably were not supposed by their author to be more. Stanza the fourth, although beginning nobly, concludes with that very common exemplification of the bathos, the illustrating natural objects of beauty or grandeur by reference to the tinsel of artificiality.