Here Apollo's _fire_ produces a _pyre_--a silvery pyre--of clouds, _wherein_ a spirit might _win_ oblivion, and melt his essence _fine_; and scented _eglantine_ gives sweets to the _sun_, and cold springs had _run_ into the _grass_; and then the pulse of the _mass_ pulsed _tenfold_ to feel the glories _old_ of the new-born day, &c.
'Be still the unimaginable lodge For solitary thinkings, such as dodge Conception to the very bourne of heaven, Then leave the naked brain; be still the leaven That, spreading in this dull and clodded earth, Gives it a touch ethereal--a new birth.'
_Lodge_, _dodge_--_heaven_, _leaven_--_earth_, _birth_--such, in six words, is the sum and substance of six lines.
"We come now to the author's taste in versification. He cannot indeed write a sentence, but perhaps he may be able to spin a line. Let us see. The following are specimens of his prosodial notions of our English heroic metre:
'Dear as the temple's self, so does the moon, The passion poesy, glories infinite.
'Of some strange history, potent to send.
'The stubborn canvas for my voyage prepared.
'Endymion, the cave is secreter Than the isle of Delos. Echo hence shall stir No sighs but sigh-warm kisses, or light noise Of thy combing hand, the while it travelling cloys And trembles through my labyrinthine hair.'
"By this time our readers must be pretty well satisfied as to the meaning of his sentences and the structure of his lines. We now present them with some of the new words with which, in imitation of Mr. Leigh Hunt, he adorns our language.
"We are told that turtles _passion_ their voices; that an arbour was _nested_, and a lady's locks _gordianed_ up; and, to supply the place of the nouns thus verbalized, Mr. Keats, with great fecundity, spawns new ones, such as men-slugs and human _serpentry_, the _honey-feel_ of bliss, wives prepare _needments_, and so forth.
"Then he has formed new verbs by the process of cutting off their natural tails, the adverbs, and affixing them to their foreheads. Thus the wine out-sparkled, the multitude up-followed, and night up-took; the wind up-blows, and the hours are down-sunken. But, if he sinks some adverbs in the verbs, he compensates the language with adverbs and adjectives which he separates from the parent stock. Thus a lady whispers _pantingly_ and close, makes _hushing_ signs, and steers her skiff into a _ripply_ cove, a shower falls _refreshfully_, and a vulture has a _spreaded_ tail.