smile, in every tear that falls,
And she shall hide her in the secret heart,
Where love persuades, and sterner duty calls:
But worse it were than death, or sorrow's smart,
To live without a friend within these walls.

III

TO THE SAME

We parted on the mountains, as two streams
From one clear spring pursue their several ways;
And thy fleet course hath been through many a maze,
In foreign lands, where silvery Padus gleams
To that delicious sky, whose glowing beams
Brightened the tresses that old Poets praise;
Where Petrarch's patient love, and artful lays,
And Ariosto's song of many themes,
Moved the soft air. But I, a lazy brook,
As close pent up within my native dell,
Have crept along from nook to shady nook,
Where flowrets blow, and whispering Naiads dwell.
Yet now we meet, that parted were so wide,
O'er rough and smooth to travel side by side.

The contrast of instructive and enviable locomotion with refining but
instructive meditation is not special and peculiar to these two, but
general and universal. It was set down by Hartley Coleridge because he
was the most meditative and refining of men.

What sort of literatesque types are fit to be described in the sort of
literature called poetry, is a matter on which much might be written.
Mr. Arnold, some years since, put forth a theory that the art of
poetry could only delineate _great actions_. But though, rightly
interpreted and understood--using the word action so as to include
high and sound activity in contemplation--this definition may suit the
highest poetry, it certainly cannot be stretched to include many
inferior sorts and even many good sorts. Nobody in their senses would
describe Gray's _Elegy_ as the delineation of a 'great action'; some
kinds of mental contemplation may be energetic enough to deserve this
name, but Gray would have been frightened at the very word. He loved
scholar-like calm and quiet inaction; his very greatness depended on
his _not_ acting, on his 'wise passiveness,' on his indulging the
grave idleness which so well appreciates so much of human life. But
the best answer--the _reductio ad absurdum_--of Mr. Arnold's doctrine,
is the mutilation which it has caused him to make of his own writings.
It has forbidden him, he tells us, to reprint _Empedocles_--a poem
undoubtedly containing defects and even excesses, but containing also
these lines:

And yet