one
short poem contains, perhaps, a greater number of happy single
expressions which one could quote than all the extant tragedies of
Sophocles. But the action, the story? The action in itself is an
excellent one; but so feebly is it conceived by the poet, so loosely
constructed, that the effect produced by it, in and for itself, is
absolutely null. Let the reader, after he has finished the poem of
Keats, turn to the same story in the 'Decameron'; he will then feel how
pregnant and interesting the same action has become in the hands of a
great artist who, above all things, delineates his object; who
subordinates expression to that which it is designed to express."

A sentence or two from Arnold's essay on Heinrich Heine, and we may leave
this part of our subject. "Mr. Carlyle attaches, it seems to me, far too
much importance to the romantic school of Germany--Tieck, Novalis, Jean
Paul Richter. . . . The mystic and romantic school of Germany lost
itself in the Middle Ages, was overpowered by their influence, came to
ruin by its vain dreams of renewing them. Heine, with a far profounder
sense of the mystic and romantic charm of the Middle Age than Goerres, or
Brentano, or Arnim; Heine, the chief romantic poet of Germany, is yet
also much more than a romantic poet; he is a great modern poet, he is not
conquered by the Middle Age, he has a talisman by which he can feel,
along with but above the power of the fascinating Middle Age itself, the
power of modern ideas."

And, finally, the oscillation of the pendulum has brought us back again
for a moment to the age of gayety, and to that very Queen Anne spirit
against which the serious and sentimental Thomson began the revolt.
There is not only at present a renewed appreciation of what was admirable
in the verse of Pope and the prose of Swift, but we discover a quaint
attractiveness in the artificiality of Augustan manners, dress, and
speech. Lace and brocade, powder and patch, Dutch gardens, Reynolds'
portraits, Watteau fans, Dresden china, the sedan chair, the spinet, the
hoop-skirt, the _talon rouge_--all these have receded so far into the
perspective as to acquire picturesqueness. To Scott's generation they
seemed eminently modern and prosaic, while buff jerkins and coats of mail
were poetically remote. But so the whirligig of time brings in its
revenges, and the old-fashioned, as distinguished from the antique,
begins to have a romanticness of its own. It is now