"Now, that is poetry, Miss Harz! the real afflatus is there; the bead on
the wine; the dew on the rose; the bloom on the grape! Nothing wanting
that constitutes the indefinable divine thing called genius! You
understand my idea, of course; explanations are superfluous."
I assented mutely, scarce knowing why I did so.
"Now, hear another." And the woods rang with his clear, sonorous accents
as he declaimed, a little too scanningly, perhaps--too much like an
enthusiastic boy:
"Love lurks upon my lady's lip,
His bow is figured there;
Within her eyes his arrows sleep;
His fetters are--her hair!"
"I call that nothing but a bundle of conceits, Major Favraud, mostly of
the days of Charles II., of Rochester himself--" interrupting him as I
in turn was interrupted.
"But hear further," and he proceeded to the end of that marvelous
ebullition of foam and fervor, such as celebrated the birth of Aphrodite
herself perchance in the old Greek time; and which, despite my perverse
intentions, stirred me as if I had quaffed a draught of pink champagne.
Is it not, indeed, all _couleur de rose?_ Hear this bit of melody, my
reader, sitting in supreme judgment, and perhaps contempt, on your
throne apart:
"'Upon her cheek the crimson ray
By changes comes and goes,
As rosy-hued Aurora's play
Along the polar snows;
Gay as the insect-bird that sips
From scented flowers the dew--
Pure as the snowy swan that dips
Its wings in waters blue;
Sweet thoughts are mirrored on her face,
Like clouds on the calm sea,
And every motion is a grace,
Each word a melody!'"
"Yes, that is true poetry, I acknowledge, Major Favraud," I exclaimed,
not at all humbled by conviction, though a little annoyed at the pointed
manner in which he gave (looking in my face as he did so) these
concluding lines:
"Say from what fair and sunny shore,
Fair wanderer, dost thou rove,
Lest what I only should adore
I heedless think to love?"
"The character of Pinckney's genius," I rejoined, "is, I think,
essentially like that of Praed, the last literary phase with me--for I
am geological in my poetry, and take it in strata.
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