Page:Sarah Sheppard - L. E. L.pdf/21

 frames, that the eye at first is prone to rest upon them; and her flowers and fruit are so embowered in leaves, that care is required lest we pass unheedingly the choicest productions. A redundant style (if it be an error) leans to the side of excellence, when embodying, as in this instance, the creations of thought and imagination. It is a living witness of the presence, not an evidence of the absence, of genius; while the very obscurity which it occasions is pleasing as the soft summer mist stealing over a landscape, and shrouding in its half-transparent veil, woven of sun and dews, the field and forest, hill and dale, stream and flower, half-hiding, indeed, their individualities, yet withal so lovely; that we cannot persuade ourselves to wish it away. Is not the poet's language likewise beautiful as a forest tree's foliage; and does it not receive light and clearness from the day-beam of genius, which doth ever make

Such a kind of diction, being poetical, is consistent with the writer's character as a poet. It may not possess, indeed, the consolidation of algebraical statements, or the conciseness of mathematical propositions: the attempt to give it these characteristics would destroy its nature. For while Philosophy piles its massive bridges of reasoning across the deep streams of thought, Poetry gracefully throws over them its suspended chain-work, which combines equal safety with greater elegance. It does not follow, therefore, that truth and right reason must be absent when the manner of their exposition differs from that employed in the abstract sciences, to which truth is supposed essentially to belong. A geometrical diagram itself may