of a
complaint, becomes oratorical; no longer low, and even, and subdued,
it assumes a more emphatic rhythm, a more rapidly returning accent;
instead of a few slow equal notes, following one after another at
regular intervals, it crowds note upon note, and often assumes a hurry
and bustle like joy. Those who are familiar with some of the best of
Rossini's serious compositions, such as the air 'Tu che i miseri
conforti', in the opera of _Tancredi_, or the duet 'Ebben per mia
memoria', in _La Gazza Ladra_, will at once understand and feel our
meaning. Both are highly tragic and passionate; the passion of both is
that of oratory, not poetry. The like may be said of that most moving
invocation in Beethoven's _Fidelio_--

Komm, Hoffnung, lass das letzte Stern
Der Muede nicht erbleichen;

in which Madame Schroeder Devrient exhibited such consummate powers of
pathetic expression. How different from Winter's beautiful 'Paga fui',
the very soul of melancholy exhaling itself in solitude; fuller of
meaning, and, therefore, more profoundly poetical than the words for
which it was composed--for it seems to express not simple melancholy,
but the melancholy of remorse.

If, from vocal music, we now pass to instrumental, we may have a
specimen of musical oratory in any fine military symphony or march:
while the poetry of music seems to have attained its consummation in
Beethoven's Overture to Egmont, so wonderful in its mixed expression
of grandeur and melancholy.

In the arts which speak to the eye, the same distinctions will be
found to hold, not only between poetry and oratory, but between
poetry, oratory, narrative, and simple imitation or description.

Pure description is exemplified in a mere portrait or a mere
landscape--productions of art, it is true, but of the mechanical
rather than of the fine arts, being works of simple imitation, not
creation. We say, a mere portrait, or a mere landscape, because it is
possible for a portrait or a landscape, without ceasing to be such, to
be also a picture; like Turner's landscapes, and the great portraits
by Titian or Vandyke.

Whatever in painting or sculpture expresses human feeling--or
character, which is only a certain state of feeling grown
habitual--may be called, according to circumstances, the poetry, or
the eloquence, of the painter's or the sculptor's art: the poetry, if
the feeling declares itself by such signs as escape from us when we
are unconscious of bei