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-The two poems of VENUS AND ADONIS and of TARQUIN AND LUCRECE appear
to us like a couple of ice-houses. They are about as hard, as
glittering, and as cold. The author seems all the time to be
thinking of his verses, and not of his subject,--not of what his
characters would feel, but of what he shall say; and as it must
happen in all such cases, he always puts into their mouths those
things which they would be the last to think of, and which it shows
the greatest ingenuity in him to find out. The whole is laboured,
up-hill work. The poet is perpetually singling out the difficulties
of the art to make an exhibition of his strength and skill in
wrestling with them. He is making perpetual trials of them as if his
mastery over them were doubted. The images, which are often
striking, are generally applied to things which they are the least
like: so that they do not blend with the poem, but seem stuck upon
it, like splendid patchwork, or remain quite distinct from it, like
detached substances, painted and varnished over. A beautiful thought
is sure to be lost in an endless commentary upon it. The speakers
are like persons who have both leisure and inclination to make
riddles on their own situation, and to twist and turn every object
or incident into acrostics and anagrams. Everything is spun out into
allegory; and a digression is always preferred to the main story.
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