ny images and feelings are here brought together without effort and
without discord, in the beauty of Adonis, the rapidity of his flight, the
yearning, yet hopelessness, of the enamoured gazer, while a shadowy ideal
character is thrown over the whole! Or this power acts by impressing the
stamp of humanity, and of human feelings, on inanimate or mere natural
objects:--

"Lo! here the gentle lark, weary of rest,
From his moist cabinet mounts up on high,
And wakes the morning, from whose silver breast
The sun ariseth in his majesty,
Who doth the world so gloriously behold,
The cedar-tops and hills seem burnish'd gold."

Or again, it acts by so carrying on the eye of the reader as to make him
almost lose the consciousness of words,--to make him see every thing
flashed, as Wordsworth has grandly and appropriately said:--

"_Flashed_ upon the inward eye
Which is the bliss of solitude;"--

and this without exciting any painful or laborious attention, without any
anatomy of description (a fault not uncommon in descriptive poetry),--but
with the sweetness and easy movement of nature. This energy is an absolute
essential of poetry, and of itself would constitute a poet, though not one
of the highest class;--it is, however, a most hopeful symptom, and the
_Venus and Adonis_ is one continued specimen of it.

In this beautiful poem there is an endless activity of thought in all the
possible associations of thought with thought, thought with feeling, or
with words, of feelings with feelings, and of words with words.

"Even as the sun, with purple-colour'd face,
Had ta'en his last leave of the weeping morn,
Rose-cheek'd Adonis hied him to the chase:
Hunting he loved, but love he laughed to scorn.
Sick-thoughted Venus makes amain unto him,
And like a bold-faced suitor 'gins to woo him."

Remark the humanizing imagery and circumstances of the first two lines,
and the activity of thought in the play of words in the fourth line. The
whole stanza presents at once the time, the appearance of the morning, and
the two persons distinctly characterised, and in six simple lines puts the
reader in possession of the whole argument of the poem.

"Over one arm the lusty courser's rein,
Under the other was the tender boy,
Who blush'd and pouted in a dull disdain,
With leaden appetite, unapt to toy,
She red and hot, as coals of glowing fire,
He red for shame, but frosty to desire:"--

This stanza and the two following afford good instan