Meantime, refracted from yon eastern cloud,
Bestriding earth, the grand ethereal bow
Shoots up immense; and every hue unfolds
In fair proportion, running from the red
To where the violet fades into the sky."

How do you like our recitation of that surpassing strain? Every shade of
feeling should have its shade of sound--every pause its silence. But
these must all come and go, untaught, unbidden, from the fulness of the
heart. Then indeed, and not till then, can words be said to be set to
music--_to a celestial sing-song_.

The mighty Minstrel recited old Ballads with a warlike march of sound
that made one's heart leap, while his usually sweet smile was drawn in,
and disappeared among the glooms that sternly gathered about his
lowering brows, and gave his whole aspect a most heroic character. Rude
verses, that from ordinary lips would have been almost meaningless, from
his came inspired with passion. Sir Philip Sidney, who said that "Chevy
Chase" roused him like the sound of a trumpet, had he heard Sir Walter
Scott recite it, would have gone distracted. Yet the "best judges" said
he murdered his own poetry--we say about as much as Homer. Wordsworth
recites his own Poetry (catch him reciting any other)
magnificently--while his eyes seem blind to all outward objects, like
those of a somnambulist. Coleridge was the sweetest of sing-songers--and
his silver voice "warbled melody." Next to theirs, we believe our own
recitation of Poetry to be the most impressive heard in modern times,
though we cannot deny that the leathern-eared have pronounced it
detestable, and the long-eared ludicrous; their delight being in what is
called Elocution, as it is taught by player-folk.

O friendly reader of these our Recreations! thou needst not to be
told--yet in love let us tell thee--that there are a thousand ways of
dealing in description with Nature, so as to make her poetical; but
sentiment there always must be, else it is stark nought. You may infuse
the sentiment by a single touch--by a ray of light no thicker, nor one
thousandth part so thick, as the finest needle ever silk-threaded by
lady's finger; or you may dance it in with a flutter of sunbeams; or you
may splash it in as with a gorgeous cloud-stain stolen from sunset; or
you may bathe it in with a shred of the rainbow. Perhaps the highest
power of all possessed by the sons of song, is to breathe it in with the
breath, to let it slip in with the light of t