ing them in a lively and comprehensible manner in the least degree lighter?

A forehead confined within the proper limits,

la fronte,

Che lo spazio finìa con giusta meta ;

A nose, in which envy itself finds nothing to improve,

Che non trova l'invidia, ove l'emende ;

A hand, somewhat long, and narrow,

Lunghetta alquanto, e di larghezza angusta;

What image do all these general phrases call up? In the mouth of a drawing master, who wished to call the attention of his scholars to the beauties of the classical model, they might mean something; for let his pupils have but one look at his model, and they see the proper limits of the joyous forehead, they see the beautiful contour of the nose, the narrowness of the delicate hand. But in the poet I see nothing, and perceive with vexation the uselessness of my most strenuous efforts to see something.

In this point, in which he can imitate Homer merely by doing nothing, Virgil also has been tolerably happy. His heroine Dido, too, is never anything more than "pulcherrima Dido." When he wishes to be more circumstantial about her, he is so in the description of her rich dress and magnificent appearance—

Tandem progreditur

Sidoniam picto chlamydem circumdata limbo:

Cui pharetra ex auro, crines nodantur in aurum, Aurea purpuream subnectit fibula vestem."

If therefore, on this account, any one were to apply to him, what an old artist said to a pupil who had painted a Helen covered with ornaments, "Since you could not paint her beautiful, you have at least made her fine," Virgil would reply, "It was not my fault that I could not paint her beautiful; the blame falls upon the limits of my art; be it my praise to have restrained myself within these limits.

I must not here forget the two songs of Anacreon, in which he analyses for us the beauty of his mistress, and of Bathyllus. The manner of doing it, which he employs, is just what it should be. He imagines that he has a painter before him, who is

working under his eye. Thus, says he, paint me the hair; thus the brow, the eyes, the mouth; thus the neck and bosom; thus the hip and hands. What the artist could only put together part by part, the poet could only give directions for part by part. It is not his intention that in these oral directions to the painter we should feel and acknowledge the whole beauty of the beloved object; he himself perceives the incapability of words to express it, and for that very reason summons to his aid the expression of art, the illusion of which he so highly extols, that the whole song appears to be an ode in the praise of art, rather b Æneid, iv. 136.

L

Od. xxviii. xxix.

than of his mistress. He sees not her image, but herself, and fancies that she is on the point of opening her mouth to speak.

ἀπέχει βλέπω γὰρ ἀυτήν.

τάχα, κηρέ, καὶ λαλήσεις.

In his sketch of Bathyllus also the praise of the beautiful boy is so interwoven with that of the art and the artist, that it becomes doubtful in whose especial honour Anacreon composed the song. He combines the most beautiful parts, whose preeminent loveliness was the characteristic of the various pictures from which he takes them. The neck is borrowed from an Adonis, the breast and hands from a Mercury, the thighs from a Pollux, the belly from a Bacchus ; and at last he sees the whole of Bathyllus in a finished Apollo of the artist.

Lucian also was too acute to attempt to convey any idea of the beauty of Panthea, otherwise than by a

reference to the most lovely female statues of the old artists.d Yet what is this but an acknowledgment, that language by itself is here without power; that poetry falters and eloquence grows speechless, unless art, in some measure, serve them as an interpreter.

d Elkoves, vol. ii. p. 461. Edit. Reitz.

CHAPTER XXI.

BUT, it will be said, does not poetry lose too much, if we deprive her of all objects of typical beauty? Who would deprive her of them? Because we endeavour to inspire her with a dislike of a single path, in which she indeed hopes to attain such forms, but, in reality, is searching after and wandering among the footsteps of her sister art, without ever reaching the same goal as she: because, I say, we would debar her from such a path as this, do we exclude her from every other, where art in her turn must gaze after her steps with fruitless longings?

Even Homer, who so pointedly abstains from all detailed descriptions of typical beauties, from whom we but just learn by a passing notice that Helen had white arms and beautiful hair; even he, for all this, knew how to convey to us an idea of her beauty, which far exceeds anything that art with this aim is able to accomplish. Let us call to mind the passage where Helen steps into an assembly of the elders of the Trojan people. The venerable elders see

her, and say to one another

a Iliad, г. iii. 121.

b

Iliad, T. iii, 329.