The London Quarterly Review (Volume 22) - Paperback

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: Obscurity. 33 abounds with the faults we have indicated, ?so much so, that its first perusal is anything but a pleasure. But even in it there are scattered passages which leave little to be desired. It is quite refreshing, in the midst of the tortuous narrative, to meet with lines so admirably descriptive as the following, making one feel as if emerging from the shadowy windings of a forest into free air and sunshine. ' His face ?Look, now he turns away! Yourselves shall trace (The delicate nostril swerving wide and fine, A sharp and restless lip, so well combine With that calm brow) a soul fit to receive Delight at every sense; you can believe Sordello foremost in the regal class Nature has broadly severed from her mass Of men, and framed for pleasure, as she frames Some happy lands, that have luxurious names, For loose fertility; a footfall there Suffices to upturn to the warm air Half-germinating spices; mere decay Produces richer life; and day by day New pollen on the lily-petal grows, And still more labyrinthine buds the rose. You recognise at once the finer dress Of flesh that amply lets in loveliness At eye and ear, while round the rest is fuiTd (As though she would not trust them with her world) A veil that shows a sky not near so blue, And lets but half the sun look fervid through.' There are times when one's thoughts flow with more lucidity and come more trippingly from the tongue; but it would be difficult for a poet, who can express himself so exquisitely as Browning is capable of doing, to convince us that obscurity is an evil which he might not have altogether avoided. As it is, it is one, perhaps, for which he has paid more than the due penalty. The impression produced by any poem depends very much on the character of its conception as a whole. If, ...