Nor the poet speaking of the rosy-fingered Aurora, for if
anyone were to dip his fingers into rose-coloured paint, he would make
his hands like those of a purple dyer, not of a beautiful woman."
The praise of women is so common, and we so often compare them to
everything beautiful, that the harsh lines in the above similes are
coloured over and almost disappear. Such language seems as suitable in
poetry, as commonplace information would be tedious, and being the
scaffolding by which the ideal rises, the complexity is not prominent as
in humour, though it adds to the pleasure afforded. But whenever the
verge of harmony is not only reached, but transgressed, the connection
of opposite ideas produces a different effect upon us, and we admit that
from the sublime to the ridiculous is but a step. When we go beyond the
natural we may, if, we heed not, enter the unnatural. In such cases we
have an additional incentive to mirth--a double complication as it were,
from the failure of the original intention.
If there were nothing in the world but what is plain and self-evident,
where would be the romance and wit which form the greatest charm of
life. Poetry recognises this; and in comic songs, especially of the
Ethiopian class lately so popular, there is rather too prominent an aim
to obtain complexity of ideas--sometimes to the verge of nonsense.
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