We venture, too, to record a perhaps hypercritical objection to ‘the blinding sky’ in this particular collocation. Perhaps in the first line of a scene, while the reader has not yet warmed to his duty, simplicity should be especially observed—a single image, without any repeated reflection, so to speak, in a second mirror, should suffice. The following, which open Scene XI., are better:—
Summer hath murmured with her leafy lips
Around my home, and I have heard her not;
I’ve missed the process of three several years
From shaking wind flowers to the tarnished gold
That rustles sere on Autumn’s aged limbs.
Except the two last lines. Our author will not keep his eye steady upon the thing before him; he goes off, and distracts us, and breaks the impression he had begun to succeed in giving, by bidding us look now at something else. Some simpler epithets than shaking, and some plainer language than tarnished gold or aged limbs, would have done the work better. We are quite prepared to believe that these faults and these disagreeables have personally been necessities to the writer, are awkwardnesses of growth, of which the full stature may show no trace. He should be assured, however, that though the rude vigour of the style of his Life-Drama may attract upon the first reading, yet in any case, it is not the sort of writing which people recur to with pleasure and fall back upon with satisfaction. It may be a groundless fancy, yet we do fancy, that there is a whole hemisphere, so to say, of the English language which he has left unvisited. His diction feels to us as if between Milton and Burns he had not read, and between Shakspeare and Keats had seldom admired. Certainly there is but little inspiration in the compositions of the last century; yet English was really best and most naturally written when there was, perhaps, least to write about. To obtain a real command of the language, some familiarity with the prose writers, at any rate, of that period, is almost essential; and to write out, as a mere daily task, passages, for example, of Goldsmith, would do a verse-composer of the nineteenth century as much good, we believe, as the study of Beaumont and Fletcher.
TWO LETTERS OF PAREPIDEMUS.
(Published in ‘Putnam’s Monthly,’ New York, for July and August 1853.)