of words, but it is very often not heavy enough to carry itself and its
covering to the mark. When it is so, its weight, as in the sonnet to
Pitt, is too frequently only another word for an ephemeral violence of
political feeling which, whether displayed on one side or the other,
cannot be expected to reproduce its effect in the minds of
comparatively passionless posterity. Extravagances, too, abound, as
when in _Kosciusko_ Freedom is made to look as if, in a fit of
"wilfulness and sick despair," she had drained a mystic urn containing
all the tears that had ever found "fit channel on a Patriot's furrowed
cheek." The main difficulty of the metre, too--that of avoiding forced
rhymes--is rarely surmounted. Even in the three fine lines in the
_Burke_---

"Thee stormy Pity and the cherished lure
Of Pomp and proud precipitance of soul,
Wildered with meteor fires"--

we cannot help feeling that "lure" is extremely harsh, while the
weakness of the two concluding lines of the sonnet supplies a typical
example of the disappointment which these "effusions" so often prepare
for their readers.

Enough, however, has been said of the faults of these early poems; it
remains to consider their merits, foremost among which, as might be
expected, is the wealth and splendour of their diction in these
passages, in which such display is all that is needed for the literary
ends of the moment. Over all that wide region of literature, in which
force and fervour of utterance, depth and sincerity of feeling avail,
without the nameless magic of poetry in the higher sense of the word,
to achieve the objects of the writer and to satisfy the mind of the