een the intertwined ideas increases. But we are
scarcely conscious of any contradiction or discordance, as there is
always something to resolve and explain it. Thus in "Il Penseroso," when
we read of "the rugged brow of Night," we think of emblematic
representations of Nox, and of the dark contraction of the brow in
frowning. There is no breach of harmony, and we always find in poetry
stepping stones which enable us to pass over difficulties. Often, too,
we are assisted in this direction by the intention or tone of the writer
or speaker.

Athenaeus exhibits well, in a story fictitious or traditional, the
contradictory elements to be found in poetry, and shows how easily
metaphorical language may become ludicrous when interpreted according to
the letter rather than the spirit. He makes Sophocles say to an
Erythraean schoolmaster who wanted to take poetical things literally,

"Then this of Simonides does not please you, I suppose, though it seems
to the Greeks very well spoken--

"The maid sends her voice
From out her purple mouth!"

"Nor the poet speaking of the golden-haired Apollo, for if the painter
had made the hair of the god golden and not black, the painting would be
all the worse. Nor the poet speaking of the rosy-fingered Aurora, for if
anyone were to dip his fingers into rose-coloured paint, he would make
his hands like those of a purple dyer, not of a beautiful woman."

The praise of women is so common, and we so often compare them to
everything beautiful, that the harsh lines in the above similes are
coloured over and almost disappear. Such language seems as suitable in
poetry, as commonplace information would be tedious, and being the
scaffolding by which the ideal rises, the complexity is not prominent as
in humour, though it adds to the pleasure afforded. But whenever the
verge of harmony is not only reached, but transgressed, the connection
of opposite ideas produces a different effect upon us, and we admit that
from the sublime to the ridiculous is but a step. When we go beyond the
natural we may, if, we heed not, enter the unnatural. In such cases we
have an additional incentive to mirth--a double complication as it were,
from the failure of the original intention.

If there were nothing in the world but what is plain and self-evident,
where would be the romance and wit which form the greatest charm of
life. Poetry recognises this; and in comic songs, especially of the
Ethiopian class lately