Do you know who reviewed ‘The White Doe,’ in the Quarterly?  After having asserted that Mr. W. uses his words without any regard to their sense, the writer says, that on no other principle can he explain that Emily is always called ‘the consecrated Emily.’  Now, the name Emily occurs just fifteen times in the poem; and out of these fifteen, the epithet is attached to it once, and that for the express purpose of recalling the scene in which she had been consecrated by her brother’s solemn adjuration, that she would fulfil her destiny, and become a soul,

    ’By force of sorrows high
    Uplifted to the purest sky
    Of undisturbed mortality.’

The point upon which the whole moral interest of the piece hinges, when that speech is closed, occurs in this line,

‘He kissed the consecrated maid;’

and to bring back this to the reader, I repeated the epithet.

The service I have lately rendered to Burns’ genius[77] will one day be performed to mine.  The quotations, also, are printed with the most culpable neglect of correctness:  there are lines turned into nonsense.  Too much of this.  Farewell!

Believe me affectionately yours,
W. WORDSWORTH.[78]

[77] See his ‘Letter to a Friend of Burns.’

[78] Memoirs, ii. 60-1.

47.  Of Poems in Stanzas.

LETTER TO ROBERT SOUTHEY.

DEAR SOUTHEY,

* * * * *

My opinion in respect to epic poetry is much the same as the critic whom Lucien Buonaparte has quoted in his preface. Epic poetry, of the highest class, requires in the first place an action eminently influential, an action with a grand or sublime train of consequences; it next requires the intervention and guidance of beings superior to man, what the critics I believe call machinery; and, lastly, I think with Dennis, that no subject but a religious one can answer the demand of the soul in the highest class of this species of poetry.  Now Tasso’s is a religious subject, and in my opinion, a most happy one; but I am confidently of opinion that the movement of Tasso’s poem rarely corresponds with the essential character of the subject; nor do I think it possible that written in stanzas it should.  The celestial movement cannot, I think, be kept up, if the sense is to be broken in that despotic manner at the close of every eight lines.  Spenser’s stanza is infinitely finer than the ottaca rhima, but even Spenser’s will not allow the epic movement as exhibited by Homer, Virgil, and Milton.  How noble is the first paragraph of the Aeneid in point of sound, compared with the first stanza of the Jerusalem Delivered!  The one winds with the majesty of the Conscript Fathers entering the Senate House in solemn procession; and the other has the pace of a set of recruits shuffling on the drill-ground, and receiving from the adjutant or drill-serjeant the commands to halt at every ten or twenty steps.  Farewell.