ing, you get, say, Moore.
Wordsworth can, as everybody but Wordsworthians holds, and as some even
of Wordsworthians admit, write the most detestable doggerel and
platitude. But when any one who knows what poetry is reads--

Our noisy years seem moments in the being
Of the eternal silence,

he sees that, quite independently of the meaning, which disturbs the
soul of no less a person than Mr. John Morley, there is one note added
to the articulate music of the world--a note that never will leave off
resounding till the eternal silence itself gulfs it. He leaves
Wordsworth, he goes straight into the middle of the eighteenth century,
and he sees Thomson with his hands in his dressing-gown pockets biting
at the peaches, and hears him between the mouthfuls murmuring--

So when the shepherd of the Hebrid Isles,
Placed far amid the melancholy main,

and there is another note, as different as possible in kind yet still
alike, struck for ever. Yet again, to take example still from the less
romantic poets, and in this case from a poet, whom Mr. Kebbel specially
and disadvantageously contrasts with Crabbe, when we read the old
schoolboy's favourite--

When the British warrior queen,
Bleeding from the Roman rods,

we hear the same quality of music informing words, though again in a
kind somewhat lower, commoner, and less. In this matter, as in all
matters that are worth handling at all, we come of course _ad
mysterium_. Why certain combinations of letters, sounds, cadences,
should almost without the aid of meaning, though no doubt immensely
assisted by meaning, produce this effect of poetry on men no man can
say. But they do; and the chief merit of criticism is that it enables us
by much study of different times and different languages to recognise
some part of the laws, though not the ultimate and complete causes, of
the production.

Now I can only say that Crabbe does not produce, or only in the rarest
instances produces, this effect on me, and what is more, that on ceasing
to be a patient in search of poetical stimulant and becoming merely a
gelid critic, I do not discover even in Crabbe's warmest admirers any
evidence that he produced this effect on them. Both in the eulogies
which Mr. Kebbel quotes, and in those that he does not quote, I observe
that the eulogists either discreetly avoid saying what they mean by
poetry, or specify for praise something in Crabbe that is not distinctly
poetical. C