Arising from dark waves which plucked at her.


And hundreds, nay, thousands more in this book, whereof it must be
said, that beautiful or not, in the eyes of the present generation--
and many of them are put into very beautiful language, and refer to
very beautiful natural objects--they are not beautiful really and in
themselves, because they are mere conceits; the analogies in them are
fortuitous, depending not on the nature of the things themselves, but
on the private fancy of the writer, having no more real and logical
coherence than a conundrum or a pun; in plain English, untrue, only
allowable to Juliets or Othellos; while their self-possession, almost
their reason, is in temporary abeyance under the influence of joy or
sorrow. Every one must feel the exquisite fitness of Juliet's
"Gallop apace, ye fiery-footed steeds," etc., for one of her
character, in her circumstances: every one, we trust, and Mr. Smith
among the number, will some day feel the exquisite unfitness of using
such conceits as we have just quoted, or any other, page after page,
for all characters and chances. For the West is not wretched; the
rains never were brutal yet, and do not insult the sun's corpse,
being some millions of miles nearer us than the sun, but only have
happened once to seem to do so in the poet's eyes. The sea does not
pant with passion, does not hunger after the beauty of the stars;
Death has no mountain-tops, or any property which can be compared
thereto; and "the dark waves"--in that most beautiful conceit which
follows, and which Mr. Smith has borrowed from Mr. Bailey, improving
it marvellously nevertheless--do not "pluck at the moon," but only
seem to do so. And what constitutes the beauty of this very conceit-
-far the best of those we have chosen--but that it looks so very like
an image, so very like a law, from being so very common and customary