Page:Under the Microscope - Swinburne (1899).djvu/42

 of night in storm. This is the true sign of flawed or defective imagination; that a man should think, because the comparison of a woman's eye to a stormy night may be striking and ennobling, therefore the inverted comparison of a stormy night to a woman's eye must also be proper and impressive. The second offence is yet worse; it is that incomparable phrase of the mountains "rejoicing o'er a young earthquake's birth," which again I should conjecture to have been borrowed from Elkanah Settle; it is really much in the manner of some lines cited from that poet by Scott in his notes on Dryden. A young earthquake! why not a young toothache, a young spasm, or a young sneeze? We see the difference between sense and nonsense, pure imagination and mere turbid energy, when we turn to a phrase of Shelley's on the same subject.

"Is this the scene Where the old earthquake-demon taught her young Ruin?"

There is a symbol conceivable by the mind's eye, noble and coherent. But to such critics as Mr. Austin it is all one; for them there are no such fine-drawn distinctions between words with a meaning and words without—with them, as with poor Elkanah, "if they rhyme and rattle, all is well." This selection and collocation of fragmentary passages, it will be said, is not the best way to attain a fair and serious estimate of either poet's worth or station; Byron may be or may