ABSTRACT
What a pity Mr. Oscar Wilde has no acquaintance with marsupials and monotremes before he wrote his poem of The Sphinx, in which we encounter many strange beasts, but ne’er a marsupial or a monotreme. By the side of these, mere hippogriffs and basilisks, ‘gryphons’ and ‘gilt-scaled dragons’ seem commonplace monsters. He must at least introduce a monotreme in the second edition. That none of us would know what it meant matters little. Indeed, for poetical purposes, it were better not! The meaning might clash with the beautiful sound, and, at any rate, it would be as intelligible to most of us as some of the strangely named beings and things that load every rift of Mr. Wilde’s curious poem with magnificence and horror. How many of us, I wonder, know the nature of ‘rods of oreichalch’?—but the phrase serves none the less, but doubtless all the more, to give that sense of mysterious luxury at which Mr. Wilde is aiming. So, I am reminded, Tennyson used ‘white samite,’ because ‘six-ply’ ‘shot-silk’ would hardly have sounded so ‘mystic, wonderful.’ Few of us know the nature of ‘samite,’ so it remains a poetical dress-material.
