urney should lye through a
fayre Vineyard, at the first give you a cluster of Grapes: that
full of that taste, you may long to passe further. He beginneth
not with obscure definitions, which must blur the margent with
interpretations, and load the memory with doubtfulnesse: but he
cometh to you with words set in delightful proportion, either
accompanied with or prepared for the well inchanting skill of
Musicke: and with a tale forsooth he cometh unto you: with a tale
which holdeth children from play, and old men from the chimney
corner."

"Is not this a glorious way to talk?" demanded the Rev. T.E. Brown of
this last passage, when he talked about Sidney, the other day, in Mr.
Henley's _New Review_. "No one can fail," said Mr. Brown, amiably
assuming the fineness of his own ear to be common to all mankind--"no
one can fail to observe the sweetness and the strength, the
outspokenness, the downrightness, and, at the same time, the nervous
delicacy of pausation, the rhythm all ripple and suspended fall, the
dainty _but_, the daintier _and forsooth_, as though the
pouting of a proud reserve curved the fine lip of him, and had to be
atoned for by the homeliness of _the chimney-corner_."

Everybody admires Sidney's prose. But how of this?--

"Poetry is the breath and finer spirit of all knowledge; it is
the impassioned expression which is in the countenance of all
science. Emphatically it may be said of the Poet, as Shakespeare
has said of man, 'that he looks before and after.' He is the rock
of defence of human nature; an upholder and preserver, carrying
everywhere with him relationship and love. In spite of difference
of soil and climate, of language and manners, of laws and
customs, _in spite of things silently gone out of mind, and
things violently destroyed_, the Poet binds together by passion
and knowledge the vast empire of human society, as it is spread
over the whole earth, and over all time."

It is Wordsworth who speaks--too rhetorically, perhaps. At any rate,
the prose will not compare with Sidney's. But it is good prose,
nevertheless; and the phrase I have ventured to italicise is superb.

Their high claims for Poesy.

As might be expected, the poets in this volume agree in pride of their
calling. We have just listened to Wordsworth. Shelley quotes Tasso's
proud sentence--"Non c'e in mondo chi merita nome di