hing poetry needs, except poetry.
They have not the poet's hall-mark. They are imitation poems, like the
forged "ancient masters" they concoct at Florence, or the Tanagra
statuettes they make in Germany. With all her consummate literary
gifts and tastes, George Eliot never managed to write a poem, and never
could be brought to see that the verses she wrote were not poems. It
was an exaggeration of the defect that mars her prose; and her verses
throw great light on her prose. They are over-laboured; the conception
overpowers the form; they are too intensely anxious to be recognised as
poems. We see not so much poetic passion, as a passionate yearning
after poetic passion. We have--not the inevitable, incalculable,
inimitable phrase of real poetry--but the slowly distilled, calculated,
and imitated effort to reach the spontaneous.

It is melancholy indeed to have to admit this, after such labour, such
noble conceptions, such mastery over language: but it is the truth.
And it explains much of kindred failure in her prose work. Great
imagination, noble conceptions, mastery over language can do much, but
they cannot make a poet. Nothing can, but being a poet. Nor can these
gifts make a great romancer or poet in prose. Nothing can, but being
born to romance, being a prose poet. As the Gospel has it--"Which of
you by taking thought can add one cubit unto his stature?" George
Eliot had not sufficiently meditated on this scripture. She too often
supposed that by taking thought--by enormous pains, profound thought,
by putting this thought in exquisite and noble words--she might produce
an immortal romance, an immortal poem.

And yet let us never forget that the _Spanish Gypsy_ is a very grand
conception, that it has some noble scenes, and here and there some
stately lines--even some beautiful passages, could we forget the
artificial alliteration and the tuneless discords to which the poet's
ear seems utterly insensible. The opening lines seem to promise well
and have much of mellow thought, in spite of five hissing sibilants in
the very first verse--

[Transcriber's note: In the original book, the letters in the poem
fragments under discussion were bolded. Here, they are delineated with
slashes (/).]

'Ti/s/ the warm /S/outh, where Europe /s/pread/s/ her land/s/.
Like fretted leaflets, breathing on the deep:

And then comes in the fourth line an awful cacophony of
alliteration--and an alliteration in "c."