used to express passion at all, but merely the quiet and normal state of the poet’s mind, or of his characters, with regard to external nature; when it is considered, as it is by most of our modern poets, the staple of poetry, indeed poetic diction itself, so that the more numerous and the stranger conceits an author can cram into his verses, the finer poet he is; then, also, it is called rant and bombast, but of the most artificial, insincere, and (in every sense of the word) monstrous kind; the offspring of an effeminate nature-worship, without self-respect, without true manhood, because it exhibits the poet as the puppet of his own momentary sensations, and not as a man superior to nature, claiming his likeness to the Author of nature, by confessing and expressing the permanent laws of Nature, undisturbed by fleeting appearances without, or fleeting tempers within.  Hence it is that, as in all insincere and effete times, the poetry of the day deals more and more with conceits, and less and less with true metaphors.  In fact, hinc illae lachrymae.  This is, after all, the primary symptom of disease in the public taste, which has set us on writing this review—­that critics all round are crying:  “An ill-constructed whole, no doubt; but full of beautiful passages”—­the word “passages” turning out to mean, in plain English, conceits.  The simplest distinction, perhaps, between an image and a conceit is this—­that while both are analogies, the image is founded on an analogy between the essential properties of two things—­the conceit on an analogy between its accidents.  Images, therefore, whether metaphors or similes, deal with laws; conceits with private judgments.  Images belong to the imagination, the power which sees things according to their real essence and inward life, and conceits to the fancy or phantasy, which only see things as they appear.

To give an example or two from the “Life Drama:” 

His heart holds a deep hope,
As holds the wretched West the sunset’s corse—­
Spit on, insulted by the brutal rains.

The passion-panting sea
Watches the unveiled beauty of the stars
Like a great hungry soul.

Great spirits,
Who left upon the mountain-tops of Death
A light that made them lovely.

The moon,
Arising from dark waves which plucked at her.

And hundreds, nay, thousands more in this book, whereof it must be said, that beautiful or not, in the eyes of the present generation—­ and many of them are put into very beautiful language, and refer to very beautiful natural objects—­they are not beautiful really and in themselves, because they are mere conceits; the analogies in them are fortuitous, depending not on the nature of the things themselves, but on the private fancy of the writer, having no more real and logical coherence than a conundrum or a pun; in plain English, untrue, only allowable to Juliets or Othellos; while their self-possession,