20 REV. JONES VERY, IX MEMORIAM ; 



the race of common sense, the successful race of man- 

 kind, from whom you would as soon expect poetry a 

 priori, as you would a flower from the cactus, thorny 

 shrub. 



He was so near to Nature, he screamed in her ear; she 

 heard him and gave him her pass key, as so many ortho- 

 dox people think they have it to heaven, they are so inti- 

 mate with the Almighty ; yet so dull is our New Eng- 

 land, with all its goodness and propriety, in this respect 

 of sensibility, grace and harmony, he has been called no 

 poet. Of course not to those who have no passion and 

 what comes from it, the burning marl of verse and white 

 heat of inspiration. Arnold, who is an intellectual poet, 

 speaks in like terms of Shelley, who distances them all 

 by his ignis fatuus light which they in vain attempt to 

 follow. Shelley's intensity and passion are illustrated, 

 j)assim: — "Julian and Maddalo," " Epipsychiclion," "The 

 Zucca," "Time," " Mazenghi," "Adonais," "Constantia," 

 "Prometheus Unbound," — especially the passage in Pal- 

 grave's " Golden Treasury" entitled, " Hymn to the Spirit 

 of Nature." 



In Tennyson, the embroidery covers the design and 

 sticks out. It is stiff with ornament. He fingers the in- 

 strument too much, jews-harp poetry, tickling the ear, a 

 dancing master posing for Apollo : dainty at all hazards, 

 cloying, effeminate, tricks, all resources of poetic effect 

 exhausted. It is all plum pudding, "slick and slab," 

 smooth, a besetting verbalness, refrains, alliterations, 

 every artifice, thought and feeling overlaid with clothes 

 and finery of style, a stifling artificiality in which we 

 breathe with difficulty and sigh for fresh air, hothouse 

 style, not a natural note, never a masculine simplicity. 

 The art comes before the matter. In the great realms of 

 English verse, a dandy. What the old conceitists w T ere, 



