050 The Beauty of Shakspeartfs Epithets. [Ju> T E, 



" Storied windows richly dight, 

 Casting a dim, religious light," 



would be worth nothing if the word " religious" were taken from it. 

 Any coupleteer might have painted the rest of the picture ; but that 

 one beautiful touch bespeaks the true poet. To any eye, light streaming 

 through painted windows would appear dim, and serious ; any indifferent 

 observer would discern the soft and serene effect of such light upon the 

 objects within a sacred building ; but the true poet sees even what is 

 common ff with a difference." It must have been in one of these 

 moments that Milton, by a touch of his master-hand, struck in this fine 

 effect and thus, by a happy expression, painted the peculiar medium of 

 the light, its softened and serious effect, and the sacredness of the place it 

 visited, as if it were poured into it from the fountain of all light in Heaven, 

 dedicated to its especial use, and made holy and, as it were, superior to 

 the common light of day. This is one of the many excellences of Mil- 

 ton, that if he puts even a common-place object in his picture, he throws 

 about it such a richness of colouring, as to render that truly beautiful 

 which, in other hands, would be trite, tedious, and nothing worth. 



It is apparent, indeed, how highly the great poets have esteemed that 

 particular beauty in the painting of poetry which consists in epithets, 

 compound and single. Homer has his " cloud-compelling" and " earth- 

 shaking" Jove, with a thousand others, equally sonorous and significant. It 

 is only inferior poets who are deficient in these riches of expression ; in fact, 

 if it were wished to try the height and depth of mind ,of any professed 

 poet, we should search his works for specimens of this poetic painting ; 

 and if we found few or none of these abundancies, these prodigalities of 

 a mind full to overflowing with poetry, we might come to this bold, but 

 not unsafe conclusion, that there was little or no innate poetry in the 

 mind of that man. There is, indeed, more of the concentration and 

 essence of poetry in many epithets in Shakspeare, in the rough lines of 

 old Chapman, the full lines of Milton, and later than him, in Herrick, 

 and even in the quaint and despised Quarles, than can be discovered in 

 the entire works of many of the persons of quality who wrote " after the 

 manner of Mr. Pope," that admirable master of more dunces than he has 

 named in his Dunciad. 



It requires, perhaps, " the poet's eye" to discern the nicety of such an 

 epithet as the " lily-wristed morn j" yet, whoever has noticed the wrist- 

 like bend of that beautiful flower, must recognise the resemblance, if they 

 cannot feel all its beauty and delicacy. There is, perhaps, more of the 

 painting of poetry in that fine Homeric compound in one of Chapman's 

 hymns " brute-footed Pan," and something which more vividly places 

 before us the express image of the Arcadian god, than we should catch 

 from a page of minute description. Drummond of Hawthornden, who 

 deals largely in beauties of this kind, has a similar piece of portrait paint- 

 ing, if I may so call it, where he speaks of the " goat-feet sylvans" 

 coming among the 



" Nymphs of the forests, nymphs who on the mountains 

 Are wont to dance, shewing their beauties' treasure" 



to these fine monster-men of the old world of imagination. 



But he " who exhausted worlds, and then imagined new" Shak- 

 speare, is the greatest painter in these brief pictures. The " well- 



