ound
toasting-fork, their interests in one common cause. The ceremony of love's
concentration can never be performed! but the heart-feeling poet extends
each tiny syllable even to its utmost stretch, that the tear-dropping
reader may, while gulping down his sympathies, make at least a handsome
mouthful of the word.
We now approach, with considerable awe, a portion of our task to which we
beg to call the undivided attention of our erudite readers. Upon referring
to the original black-letter quarto, we find, after each particular
sentence, the author introduces, with consummate tact, a line, meant, as
we presume, as a kind of literary resting-place, upon which the delighted
mind might, in the sweet indulgence of repose, reflect with greater
pleasure on the thrilling parts, made doubly thrilling by the poet's fire.
The diversity of these, if we may so express them, "camp stools" of
imagination, is worthy of remark, both as to their application and
amplitude. For instance, after _one_ line, and that if perused with
attention, comparatively less abstruse than its fellows, the gifted poet
satisfies himself with the insertion of three sonorous, but really simple
syllables, they are invariably at follows--
"Too-ral-loo!"
But when _two_ lines of the poem--burning with thought, bursting with
action--entrance by their sublimity the enraptured reader, greater time is
given, and more extended accommodation for a mental sit-down is afforded
in the elaborate and elongated composition of
"Whack! fol-de-riddle lol-de-day!"
These introductions are of a high classic origin. Many professors of
eminence have quarrelled as to whether they were not the original of the
"Greek chorus;" while others, of equal erudition, have as stoutly
maintained, though closely approximating in character and purpose, they
are not the "originals," but imitations, and decidedly admirable ones,
from those celebrated poets.
A Mr. William Waters, a gentleman of immense travel, one who had left the
burning zone of the far East to visit the more chilling gales of a
European climate, a philosopher of the sect known as the "Peripatetic," a
devoted follower of the heathen Nine, whose fostering care has ever been
devoted to the tutelage of the professors of sweet sounds; and therefore
Waters was a high authority, declared in the peculiar _patois_ attendant
upon the pronunciation of a foreign mode of speech--that
"Too-ral-loo"
was to catch him wind!
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