Page:The New Monthly Magazine - Volume 100.djvu/53

Rh clouds is likened to hoary Jacob, coached in death, among his waiting sons.

And as for the stars—let the poet's answer to them that do accuse him be this, in the reply of Walter to Violet's sarcasm ("Great friends of yours; you lore them overmuch"):What a sudden gush of beauty there is in that abrupt transition in Duke Vincentio's discourse, in the prison cell of Vienna ("Measure for Measure"), from details of dungeon vice in its blackness of darkness, and directions for the gaoler and the hangman, and depressing associations with the foul atmosphere, foul victims, foul satellites of the place-to the calm holy dayspring whose first herald is seen through the reeking bars—"Look, the unfolding star calls up the shepherd." What suggestive power and pathos in those few words—what a solemn-sweet parenthesis in discourse devoted to the strifes and sins of the condemned cell!—turning aside, for one little moment, from the bad city's corruption that "boils and bubbles, till it o'er-runs the stew," to the silent dawn and its unfolding star, to the dew of morning on the everlasting hills, whither wend their way the shepherd and his flock—image of pastoral innocence, unspotted by the world.

A se ns of this fine "discord" makes the soul feelingly alive to Walter's star-worship. Thus does the young man pent-up within city walls continue his defence:

And granting, as Mr. Smith's warmest admirers must grant, the extraordinary proportion of space monopolised by the Solar System in his poems, there is at least this to be said on the other side, that he has certainly infused new life and beauty into so old and withered a subject—that in taking such common-places for his theme, he has presented poetry's very old friends with very new faces—and that where nineteen out of twenty bardlings would, by the seeming necessity of the case, repeat the used-up, threadbare phrases and ideas as by law provided, he, when approaching these exhausted old worlds, in effect imagines new.

So with his redundancy of imagery in general. His similitudes are plenty as blackberries, but not so common and cheap. The multiplicity