“They could not be mar-ri-ed!”

There is something deliciously affecting in the beautiful drawing out of the last syllable!—­it seems like the lingering of the heart’s best feelings upon the blighted prospects of its purest joys!—­the ceremony that would have completed the union of the loving maiden and admiring swain, blending, as it were, like the twin prongs of a brass-bound toasting-fork, their interests in one common cause.  The ceremony of love’s concentration can never be performed! but the heart-feeling poet extends each tiny syllable even to its utmost stretch, that the tear-dropping reader may, while gulping down his sympathies, make at least a handsome mouthful of the word.

We now approach, with considerable awe, a portion of our task to which we beg to call the undivided attention of our erudite readers.  Upon referring to the original black-letter quarto, we find, after each particular sentence, the author introduces, with consummate tact, a line, meant, as we presume, as a kind of literary resting-place, upon which the delighted mind might, in the sweet indulgence of repose, reflect with greater pleasure on the thrilling parts, made doubly thrilling by the poet’s fire.  The diversity of these, if we may so express them, “camp stools” of imagination, is worthy of remark, both as to their application and amplitude.  For instance, after one line, and that if perused with attention, comparatively less abstruse than its fellows, the gifted poet satisfies himself with the insertion of three sonorous, but really simple syllables, they are invariably at follows—­

  “Too-ral-loo!”

But when two lines of the poem—­burning with thought, bursting with action—­entrance by their sublimity the enraptured reader, greater time is given, and more extended accommodation for a mental sit-down is afforded in the elaborate and elongated composition of

  “Whack! fol-de-riddle lol-de-day!”

These introductions are of a high classic origin.  Many professors of eminence have quarrelled as to whether they were not the original of the “Greek chorus;” while others, of equal erudition, have as stoutly maintained, though closely approximating in character and purpose, they are not the “originals,” but imitations, and decidedly admirable ones, from those celebrated poets.

A Mr. William Waters, a gentleman of immense travel, one who had left the burning zone of the far East to visit the more chilling gales of a European climate, a philosopher of the sect known as the “Peripatetic,” a devoted follower of the heathen Nine, whose fostering care has ever been devoted to the tutelage of the professors of sweet sounds; and therefore Waters was a high authority, declared in the peculiar patois attendant upon the pronunciation of a foreign mode of speech—­that

  “Too-ral-loo”

was to catch him wind!  And

  “Whack! fol-de-riddle lol-de-day,”