se the sensation of the
poet's efforts carries away our thoughts from his achievements. We are
admiring his labours when we should be enjoying his words. But this is
a defect in those two writers, not a defect in pure art. Of course it
is more difficult to write in few words than to write in many; to take
the best adjuncts, and those only, for what you have to say, instead
of using all which comes to hand; it _is_ an additional labour if you
write verses in a morning, to spend the rest of the day in _choosing_,
or making those verses fewer. But a perfect artist in the pure style
is as effortless and as natural as in any style, perhaps is more so.
Take the well-known lines:

There was a little lawny islet
By anemone and violet,
Like mosaic, paven:
And its roof was flowers and leaves
Which the summer's breath enweaves,
Where nor sun, nor showers, nor breeze,
Pierce the pines and tallest trees,
Each a gem engraven;--
Girt by many an azure wave
With which the clouds and mountains pave
A lake's blue chasm.

Shelley had many merits and many defects. This is not the place for a
complete or indeed for _any_ estimate of him. But one excellence is
most evident. His words are as flexible as any words; the rhythm of
some modulating air seems to move them into their place without a
struggle by the poet and almost without his knowledge. This is the
perfection of pure art, to embody typical conceptions in the choicest,
the fewest accidents, to embody them so that each of these accidents
may produce its full effect, and so to embody them without effort.

The extreme opposite to this pure art is what may be called ornate
art. This species of art aims also at giving a delineation of the
typical idea in its perfection and its fullness, but it aims at so
doing in a manner most different. It wishes to surround the type with
the greatest number of circumstances which it will _bear_. It works
not by choice and selection, but by accumulation and aggregation. The
idea is not, as in the pure style, presented with the least clothing
which it will endure, but with the richest and most involved clothing
that it will admit.

We are fortunate in not having to hunt out of past literature an
illustrative specimen of the ornate style. Mr. Tennyson has just given
one admirable in itself, and most characteristic of the defects and
the merits of this style. The story of Enoch Arden, as he has