Soft be the sound ordained thy sleep to break When thou art waking, wake me, for thy Master's sake! 16 16 From a volume containing The Search after Proserpine. Recollections of Greece and other Poems by Aubrey de Vere, author of The Fall of Rora. APPENDIX. 66 ON THE POETICAL PICTURESQUE. MR. HALLAM and Mr. Leigh Hunt have both expressed dissent from my Father's remark in the Remains, i., pp. 93–4, that Spenser's descriptions are not in the true sense of the word picturesque; but are composed of a wondrous series of images, as in our dreams." Whether or not "the true sense of the word picturesque" is what my Father meant, I do not pretend to determine, but I think that what he meant is true of Spenser, and indicates a characteristic difference between his painting and that of Dante, Pindar, and more or less of many other poets. Lessing gives the widest definition of the poetical picturesque; he says that a poet writes picturesquely, not when his words furnish matter for a material painting; many writers do this whose writing is not picturesque ;-but when they have the same effect as a material painting in bringing a sensuous object vividly before the mind. Paradise Lost, as Martin's illustrations have proved, is not very picturable. Who can paint such universalities as he deals with in his world-poem? Who could show on canvas how Vernal airs Breathing the smell of field and grove attune or how as earth, so he the world Built on circumfluous waters calm, in wide Yet no one will deny the truth of Milton's language, and that every sight, sound, and other sensation which he speaks of is faithfully imaged by his words? My Father, on the other hand, seems to have been speaking of the picturesque in the most restricted sense. He calls a poetic description properly such, when it presents a composite object of sight, containing neither more nor less than we might see at once with our eyes, the poet making this picture the emblem of a sentiment, instead of explaining the sentiment directly; or when he tells a story by means of it. This sort of picture-drawing belongs to rapid, vehement writers; it speeds on the representation; it has an oriental heat and intensity about it. There is a vivid one in Solomon's Song, if I may venture to speak of that part of the Canon in reference to poetry. It is in chap. v., verses 2-4. I do not say that this could be put on canvas; the capability of being actually painted is not the criterion of the poetical picturesque ;—many of Pindar's finest pictures could not be materially painted: it is enough that our eye in thought can embrace the whole at once; the Beloved with his hand upon the lock, and his hair wet with the dews of night; the Spouse within upon her couch, her doffed raiment lying beside it. Instances of the same kind in Pindar are Jove's Eagle asleep on the sceptre, ruffling up his feathers in transport, while the dancers are moving to the sound of the Lyre; Mars lying in tranced slumber, and the other gods listening all around; Neptune appearing to Pelops by the sea-side in the darkness; Pallas appearing to Bellerophon at night, all gleaming in armor, darkly blue,-he leaping to his feet and seizing the golden bridle which she had laid beside him: Iamus calling to his Sire and Grandsire by night from the midst of the Alpheus. These three last would not make good material pictures, because of the darkness; even Rembrandt would not have managed them well had he tried to present the poet's vision faithfully; but how vivid they are to the mind's eye! Instances in Dante are numerous, but I will select two. Caron dimonio, con occhi di bragia, Charon, " demoniac form," with wheels of flame around his eyes, collecting the shades into his boat upon the livid lake, and striking with his oar whoever lingers: another unpicturable picture. This is in the third Canto; in the ninth we have the three Furies rising up at the fiery top of a tower in the city of Dis, blood-stained, girt about the waist with hydras of the deepest green, having small serpents for loose ringlets, and the large-horned cerastes wound about their temples by way of braid; Megæra on the left, Alecto weeping on the right, Tisiphone in the midst. This is picturable Flaxman has designed it finely: his Megæra expresses deadly hate; Alecto the torture of intolerable grief (Dante describes her as "Adam bending over the sleeping Eve in the Paradise Lost (Book v., ver. 18), and Dalilah approaching Samson, in the Agonistes (i., 710), are the only two proper pictures I remember in Milton "-Table Talk, p. 182. weeping); Tisiphone, the central figure, appears the image of Phrensy, to which all violent passion tends, and in which it is merged when it transcends certain limits. Euripides has many pictures: there is the Trojan dame, gazing into the golden mirror, that flashes back the light with interminable reflection, while she binds up her locks under the head-band or mitre, ready to sink upon the vest-spread couch, where her husband lies asleep, his spear suspended against the wall of the chamber. This is in the Hecuba, and there is a companion to it in the Medea;3 Glauce drest in her gorgeous attire, rising from her chair and tripping delicately on her white feet, after smiling at herself in the glass as she placed upon her curled hair the golden crown; and there is a grand contrast to it in the Phænissæ ;*—Capaneus struck by lightning, as he is stepping over the battlement of the tower he has scaled; his body is rent asunder as by a sling; his hair flies upward, his blood gushes downward; his hands and feet are whirled round like Ixion's wheel, his bloated corse falls to the ground. Horace does not abound in pictures, but there is one at the beginning of his Ode to Bacchus, and another very striking at the end of it. Te vidit insons Cerberus aureo Virgil's description of Venus appearing to her son in the first Æneid is a true picture. There is a beautiful one of Kailyal in Kehama: There he beholds upon the sand A lovely maiden in the moonlight stand. While statue-like she seems her watch to keep, This might be a pendant to the Ariadne of Catullus: 2 Hecuba, 919. See the translation of the beautiful chorus in which this picture occurs, by Judge Coleridge, in the Table Talk, p. 244-6, 2d edition. 3 Medea, 1160. En., ver. 314. 4 Phænisse, 1187. 5 Lib. ii., Carm. xix. Immemor at juvenis fugiens pellit vada remis, Saxea ut effigies bacchantis prospicit Evo, &c. There is some fine passionate painting in the second Choral Ode of the Agamemnon. The feeling of the passage, to which I allude, is perhaps conveyed in this free translation, which however departs far enough, I own, from the grand statue-like simplicity and severity of the original. Πάρεστι σιγ ̓ ἐς ἁτίμους ἀλοίδορος. κ. τ. λ. v. 380-92.9 He comes and he casts not a curse on their head! A spectre appears in the palace to reign.10 8 Nuptia Pelei et Thetidos, ver. 58. 9 I should prefer the old reading with Hermann's emendation of σıyãcı, if scholars allowed it, Πάρεστι σ γὰς, ἄτιμος, ἀλοίδορος, Αριστος ἀφεμένων ἰδεῖν. and would render it thus, He comes in silence, unavenged, unreviling, as we might say, no other man was ever seen to take such a thing so sweetly and quietly. Passow gives the word oɩyás, and also suggests σiyās Doric for σιγῆς, σιγήεις: but ad would not correspond to the metre of the antistrophe. I cannot see why rtuos is inapplicable to Menelaus, as Klausen intimates: to Helen it certainly is. Scholefield reads Πάρεστι σίγ ̓ ἄτιμος, ἀλλ' ἀλοίδορος my objection to which is that the first verse runs like prose: àλ\' aλoídopos, would hardly do in the heart of a choral ode;-for the second line, that apɛuévav does not properly mean gone away, but let go, and that it does not carry on the sense of the preceding line so directly and closely as that which I suggest. 10"And in the yearning sick for her Who now beyond the sea doth roam, A phantasm vain shall seem to sit as queen within his home." "Avacoa is Greek for a Queen, the feminine termination precluding all ambiguity; but would ivásoɛiv be used by a Greek writer to signify the mere |