ir, he stood
astonished at the cliff that came prerupt from his canvass, and
christened itself "the Eagle's Eyrie," as it _frowned serenely_ upon the
sea, maddening in a foamy circle at its inaccessible feet.

Only in such prose as ours can the heart pour forth its effusions like a
strong spring discharging ever so many gallons in a minute, either into
pipes that conduct it through some great Metropolitan city, or into a
water-course that soon becomes a rivulet, then a stream, then a river,
then a lake, and then a sea. Would Fancy luxuriate? Then let her expand
wings of prose. In verse, however irregular, her flight is lime-twigged,
and she soon takes to hopping on the ground. Would Imagination dive? Let
the bell in which she sinks be constructed on the prose principle, and
deeper than ever plummet sunk, it will startle monsters at the roots of
the coral caves, yet be impervious to the strokes of the most tremendous
of tails. Would she soar? In a prose balloon she seeks the stars. There
is room and power of ascension for any quantity of ballast--fling it
out, and up she goes! Let some gas escape, and she descends far more
gingerly than Mrs Graham and his Serene Highness; the grapnel catches a
stile, and she steps "like a dreadless angel unpursued" once more upon
_terra firma_, and may then celebrate her aerial voyage, if she choose,
in an Ode which will be sure near the end to rise--into prose.

Prose, we believe, is destined to drive what is called Poetry out of the
world. Here is a fair challenge. Let any Poet send us a poem of five
hundred lines--blanks or not--on any subject; and we shall write on that
subject a passage of the same number of words in prose; and the Editors
of the Quarterly, Edinburgh, and Westminster, shall decide which
deserves the prize. Milton was woefully wrong in speaking of "prose or
numerous verse." Prose is a million times more numerous than verse. Then
prose improves the more poetical it becomes; but verse, the moment it
becomes prosaic, goes to the dogs. Then, the connecting links between
two fine passages in verse, it is enjoined, shall be as little like
verse as possible; nay, whole passages, critics say, should be of that
sort; and why, pray, not prose at once? Why clip the King's English, or
the Emperor's German, or the Sublime Porte's Turkish, into bits of dull
jingle--pretending to be verses merely because of the proper number of
syllables--some of them imprisoned perhaps in parenthe