Page:The New Monthly Magazine - Volume 101.djvu/241

Rh philosophic intricacy of meaning, so it is abundant in certain audacities of style, curiosities of similitude, and wilful neologisms, towards which conservative Europe is apt to exercise less charity than are our frisky cousins over the water. Admirers there doubtless are of such pictured phrases as that of the grim sea-monster,or that ofor that ofApologists too there may be for such eccentricities in diction as "whispery," "un-man-stifled," "enhaloed," "treeified" (applied to Daphne's metamorphosis), "bipedal," "dis-privacied," &c. Mr. Lowell's tendency to "free-and-easy" ways finds an appropriate outlet, and he makes the most of it, in the Hudibrastic rhymes of the "Fable for Critics." Coleridge dignifies as a lower species of wit those double and tri-syllable rhymes, of which Kit Smart's distich to the Welsh Squire who had promised him a hare is an amusing instance:and of which, again, one of the most ingenious on record is Byron's:As illustrations of Mr. Lowell's achievements in this sleight-of-hand agility, take the following—rent rudely asunder from the context, by the way, being cited merely in consideration of their rhyming characteristics: