Page:Blackwood's Magazine volume 002.djvu/206

200 melancholy shades, he perceives, at a distance, a pair of solitary ghosts, who seem to be devoured with a still severer anguish, and, in their altered forms, which seem, as he says, to be tossing about like straws in the wind, he recognises, with a shudder of horror, the faded features of Francesca and her lover.

The moral purpose of the question, and the deep pathos of the reply, can stand in need of no comment. But Mr Hunt has shewn very little judgment in borrowing the tale so closely from Dante, and yet entirely omitting all those circumstances in the great Poet's narrative, which render the introduction, as well as the description of that passionate scene, at once so natural and so impressive. We listen without offence to the pale miserable spectre, who is condemned to add to her own wretchedness by the intense exactness of her recollection. But we cannot pardon the same thirds in a poet who takes the story of Francesca from her mouth into his own, and gives us that as a gratuitous effusion of his imagination, which was originally an agonized dream of self-torturing memory.

—"Paolo, by degrees, gently embraced, With one permitted arm, her lovely waist; And both their cheeks, like peaches on a tree, Leaned with a touch together thrillingly; And o'er the book they hung, and nothing said, And every lingering page grew longer as they read. As thus they sat, and felt, with leaps of heart, Their colour change, they came upon the part Where fond Geneura, with her flame long nurst, Smiled upon Launcelot when he kissed her first:— That touch, at last, through every fibre slid, And Paolo turned, scarce knowing what he did,— Only he felt he could no more dissemble, And kissed her, mouth to mouth, all in a tremble. Sad were those hearts, and sweet was that long kiss: Sacred be love from sight, whate'er it is.