red much of fools, _women_, and boys--

altered to

And was admired much of women, fools, and boys--

thus destroying the fine scornful emphasis on the first syllable of
'women'! (an ungallant intimation, by the way, against the fair sex,
very startling in this no less woman-loving than great poet). Any
poetaster can be smooth. Smoothness abounds in all small poets, as
sweetness does in the greater. Sweetness is the smoothness of grace
and delicacy,--of the sympathy with the pleasing and lovely. Spenser
is full of it,--Shakespeare--Beaumont and Fletcher--Coleridge. Of
Spenser's and Coleridge's versification it is the prevailing
characteristic. Its main secrets are a smooth progression between
variety and sameness, and a voluptuous sense of the continuous,--'linked
sweetness long drawn out'. Observe the first and last lines of the
stanza in the _Faerie Queene_, describing a shepherd brushing away the
gnats;--the open and the close _e's_ in the one,

As gentle shepherd in sw[=e][=e]t [=e]ventide--

and the repetition of the word _oft_, and the fall from the vowel _a_,
into the two _u's_ in the other,--

She brusheth _oft_, and _oft_ doth mar their m[=u]rm[)u]rings.

So in his description of two substances in the handling, both equally
smooth:

_Each smoother seems than each, and each than each seems smoother._

An abundance of examples from his poetry will be found in the volume
before us. His beauty revolves on itself with conscious loveliness.
And Coleridge is worthy to be named with him, as the reader will see
also, and has seen already. Let him take a sample meanwhile from the
poem called the _Day Dream_! Observe both the variety and sameness of
the vowels, and the repetition of the soft consonants:

My eyes make pictures when they're shut:--
I see a fountain, large and fair,
A willow and a ruin'd hut,
And _thee_ and _me_ and Mary there.
_O Mary! make thy gentle lap our pillow;
Bend o'er us, like a bower, my beautiful green willow._

By _Straightforwardness_ is meant the flow of words, in their natural
order, free alike from mere prose, and from those inversions to which
bad poets recur in order to escape the charge of prose, but chiefly to
accommodate their rhymes. In Shadwell's play of _Psyche_, Venus gives
the sisters of the heroine an answer, of which the following is the
_entire_ substance, literally, in so many words. The author had
nothing better for he