The poet, who is surely the father himself, cannot always keep up the
allegory; his heart burns holes in it constantly; at one time he says
_she_, at another _it_, and, between the girl and the pearl, the poem is
bewildered. But the allegory helps him out with what he means
notwithstanding; for although the highest aim of poetry is to say the
deepest things in the simplest manner, humanity must turn from mode to
mode, and try a thousand, ere it finds the best. The individual, in his
new endeavour to make "the word cousin to the deed," must take up the
forms his fathers have left him, and add to them, if he may, new forms of
his own. In both the great revivals of literature, the very material of
poetry was allegory.

The father falls asleep on his child's grave, and has a dream, or rather
a vision, of a country where everything--after the childish imagination
which invents differences instead of discovering harmonies--is
super-naturally beautiful: rich rocks with a gleaming glory, crystal
cliffs, woods with blue trunks and leaves of burnished silver, gravel of
precious Orient pearls, form the landscape, in which are delicious
fruits, and birds of flaming colours and sweet songs: its loveliness no
man with a tongue is worthy to describe. He comes to the bank of a river:

Swinging sweet the water did sweep
With a whispering speech flowing adown;
(Wyth a rownande rourde raykande aryght)

and the stones at the bottom were shining like stars. It is a noteworthy
specimen of the mode in which the imagination works when invention is
dissociated from observation and faith. But the sort of way in which some
would improve the world now, if they might, is not so very far in advance
of this would-be glorification of Nature. The barest heath and sky have