the beauty of this very conceit-
-far the best of those we have chosen--but that it looks so very like
an image, so very like a law, from being so very common and customary
an ocular deception to one standing on a low shore at night?

Or, again, in a passage which has been already often quoted as
exquisite, and in its way is so:

The bridegroom sea
Is toying with the shore, his wedded bride;
And in the fulness of his marriage joy
He decorates her tawny brow with shells,
Retires a pace, to see how fair she looks,
Then proud, runs up to kiss her.

Exquisite? Yes; but only exquisitely pretty. It is untrue--a false
explanation of the rush and recoil of the waves. We learn nothing by
these lines; we gain no fresh analogy between the physical and the
spiritual world, not even between two different parts of the physical
world. If the poetry of this age has a peculiar mission, it is to
declare that such an analogy exists throughout the two worlds; then
let poetry declare it. Let it set forth a real intercommunion
between man and nature, grounded on a communion between man and God,
who made nature. Let it accept nature's laws as the laws of God.
Truth, scientific truth, is the only real beauty. "Let God be true,
and every man a liar."

Now, be it remembered that by far the greater proportion of this book
consists of such thoughts as these; and that these are what are
called its beauties; these are what young poets try more and more
daily to invent--conceits, false analogies. Be it remembered, that
the affectation of such conceits has always marked the decay and
approaching death of a reigning school of poetry; that when, for
instance, the primeval forest of the Elizabethan poets dwindled down
into a barren scrub of Vaughans, and Cowleys, and Herberts, and
Crashawes, this was the very form in which the deadly blight
appeared. In vain did the poetasters, frightened now and then at
their own nonsense, try to keep up the decaying dignity of poetry by
drawing their conceits, as poetasters do now, from suns and galaxies,
earthquakes, eclipses, and the portentous, and huge and gaudy in
Nature; the lawlessness and irreverence for Nature, involved in the
very worship of conceits, went on degrading the tone of the conceits
themselves, till the very sense of true beauty and fitness seemed
lost; and a pious and refined gentleman like George Herbert could
actually dare to indite solemn conundrums to the Supreme Being,