sitely pure."

It is one thing to know what your peach is, that it is the fruit of a
rosal exogen, and is of the nature of a true drupe, with its carpel
solitary, and its style proceeding from the apex,--that its ovules are
anatropal, and that its _putamen_ separates _sponte sua_ from the
sacrocarp; to know, moreover, how many kinds of peaches and nectarines
there are in the world, and how happy the Canadian pigs must be of an
evening munching the downy odoriferous drupes under the trees, and what
an aroma this must give to the resulting pork,[44]--it is another and a
better thing to pluck the peach, and sink your teeth into its fragrant
flesh. We remember only one exception to this rule. Who has ever yet
tasted the roast pig of reality which came up to the roast pig of
Charles Lamb? Who can forget "that young and tender suckling, under a
moon old, guiltless as yet of the style, with no original speck of the
_amor immunditiae_--the hereditary failing of the first parent, yet
manifest, and which, when prepared aright, is, of all the delicacies in
the _mundus edibilis_, the most delicate--_obsoniorum facile
princeps_--whose fat is not fat, but an indefinable sweetness growing up
toward it--the tender blossoming of fat--fat cropped in the bud--taken
in the shoot--in the first innocence, the cream and quintessence of the
child-pig's yet pure food--the lean not lean, but a kind of animal
manna--_coelestis_--_cibus ille angelorum_--or rather shall we say, fat
and lean (if it must be so) so blended and running into each other, that
both together make but one ambrosial result." But here, as elsewhere,
the exception proves the rule, and even the perusal of "Original"
Walker's delicious schemes of dinners at Lovegrove's, with flounders
water-zoutched, and iced claret, would stand little chance against an
invitation to a party of six to Blackwall, with "Tom Young of the
Treasury" as Prime Minister.

[44] We are given to understand that peach-fed pork is a poor
pork after all, and goes soon into decomposition. We are not
sorry to know this.

Poetry is the expression of the beautiful--by words--the beautiful of
the outer and of the inner world; whatever is delectable to the eye or
the ear, the every sense of the body and of the soul--it presides over
_veras dulcedines rerum_. It implies at once a vision and a faculty, a
gift and an art. There must be the vivid conception of the beautiful,
and its fit manifestat