A soft pulsation in their easy ear;
To turn the page, and let their senses drink
A lay that shall not trouble them to think.'

It is no great wonder it should be so. After dinner, when disposed to
sleep, but afraid of spoiling our night's rest, behold the witching
hour reserved by the nineteenth century for the study of poetry! This
treatment of the muse deserves to be held up to everlasting scorn and
infamy in a passage of Miltonic strength and splendour. We, alas!
must be content with the observation, that such an opinion of the true
place of poetry in the life of a man excites, in the breasts of the
rightminded, feelings akin to those which Charles Lamb ascribes to the
immortal Sarah Battle, when a young gentleman of a literary turn, on
taking a hand in her favourite game of whist, declared that he saw no
harm in unbending the mind, now and then, after serious studies, in
recreations of that kind. She could not bear, so Elia proceeds, 'to
have her noble occupation, to which she wound up her faculties,
considered in that light. It was her business, her duty--the thing she
came into the world to do--and she did it: she unbent her mind,
afterwards, over a book!' And so the lover of poetry and Browning,
after winding-up his faculties over 'Comus' or 'Paracelsus,' over
'Julius Caesar' or 'Strafford,' may afterwards, if he is so minded,
unbend himself over the 'Origin of Species,' or that still more
fascinating record which tells us how little curly worms, only give
them time enough, will cover with earth even the larger kind of
stones.

Next to these dramatic pieces come what we may be content to call
simply poems: some lyrical, some narrative. The latter are
straightforward enough, and, as a rule, full of spirit and humour; but