accent in the word lament is at variance with the plainest proprieties of the English tongue. The "earth-spirits" deliver themselves thus:—
Earth Spirits.
" And we scorn you! There's no pardon
Which can lean to you aright!
When your bodies take the guerdon
Of the death-curse in our sight,
Then the bee that hummeth lowest shall transcend you.
Then ye shall not move an eyelid
Though the stars look down your eyes;
And the earth, which ye defiled,
She shall show you to the skies,—
'Lo! these kings of ours—who sought to comprehend you.'
First Spirit.
And the elements shall boldly
All your dust to dust constrain;
Unresistedly and coldly,
I will smite you with my rain!
From the slowest of my frosts is no receding.
Second Spirit.
And my little worm, appointed
To assume a royal part,
He shall reign, crown'd and anointed,
O'er the noble human heart!
Give him counsel against losing of that Eden!"
In one of the lyrical effusions, man is informed that when he goes to heaven—
" Then a sough of glory
Shall your entrance greet,
Ruffling round the doorway
The smooth radiance it shall meet."
We wonder what meaning Miss Barrett attaches to the word sough! It is a term expressive of the dreary sighing of autumnal winds, or any sound still more disconsolate and dreary and therefore, to talk of a "sough of glory," is to talk neither more nor less than absolute nonsense.
What can be more unlyrical than this verse?
"Live, work on, oh, Earthy!
By the Actual's tension
Speed the arrow worthy
Of a pure ascension."
We have said that the lyrical effusions interspersed throughout the "Drama of Exile," are very slovenly and defective in point of rhyme. What can be worse than "Godhead" and "wooded,"' "treading" and "Eden," "glories" and "floorwise," "calmly" and "palm-tree," "atoms" and "fathoms," "accompted" and "trumpet," and a hundred others? What can be worse, do we ask? We answer that there is one species of rhyme which Miss Barrett is sometimes, though we are happy to say, very rarely, guilty of, which is infinitely more reprehensible than any of these inaccuracies. We allude to the practice of affixing an r to the end of certain words, in order to make them rhyme with other words which terminate in that letter. Writers who are guilty of this atrocity are not merely to be condemned as bad rhymester they are to be blamed on the far more serious ground that they give the sanction and authority of print to one of the vilest vulgarisms which pollutes the oral language of certain provincial societies. What makes the practice so offensive in literary composition is the fact, that the barbarism is one which may sometimes be actually heard falling from living lips. But for this, it would be pardonable. We verily believe that Miss Barrett herself does not talk of "Laurar" and "Matildar" we verily believe that she would consider any one who does so no fit associate for herself in point of manners or education:—yet she scruples not to make "Aceldama" (r) rhyme to "tamer," and "Onora"(r) rhyme to "o'er her." When we think of these things,
