riefly, De Quincey is doing in prose what every great poet does in
verse. The specific mark thus indicated is still insufficient to give
him a solitary position among writers. All great rhetoricians, as De
Quincey defines and explains the term, rise to the borders of poetry,
and the art which has recently been cultivated among us under the name
of word-painting may be more fitly described as an attempt to produce
poetical effects without the aid of metre. From most of the writers
described under this rather unpleasant phrase he differs by the
circumstance, that his art is more nearly allied to music than to
painting. Or, if compared to any painters, it must be to those who care
comparatively little for distinct portraiture or dramatic interest. He
resembles rather the school which is satisfied by contemplating
gorgeous draperies, and graceful limbs and long processions of imposing
figures, without caring to interpret the meaning of their works, or to
seek for more than the harmonious arrangement of form and colour. In
other words, his prose-poems should be compared to the paintings which
aim at an effect analogous to that of stately pieces of music. Milton is
the poet whom he seems to regard with the sincerest admiration; and he
apparently wishes to emulate the majestic rhythm of the 'God-gifted
organ-voice of England.' Or we may, perhaps, admit some analogy between
his prose and the poetry of Keats, though it is remarkable that he
speaks with very scant appreciation of his contemporary. The 'Ode to a
Nightingale,' with its marvellous beauty of versification and the dim
associations half-consciously suggested by its language, surpasses,
though it resembles, some of De Quincey's finest passages; and the
'Hyperion' might have been translated into prose as a fitting companion
for some of the opium dreams. It is in the success with which he
produces such effects as these that De Quincey may fairly claim to be
unsurpassed in our language. Pompous (if that word may be used in a good
sense) declamation in prose, where the beauty of the thought is lost in
the splendour of the style, is certainly a rare literary product. Of the
great rhetoricians whom De Quincey quotes in the Essay on Rhetoric just
noticed, such men as Burke and Jeremy Taylor lead us to forget the means
in the end. They sound the trumpet as a warning, not for the mere
delight in its volume of sound. Perhaps his affinity to Sir Thomas
Browne is more obvious; and on