In his power of crystallising commonplaces he stands next to Pope, in subtle felicity of expression beside Virgil. And, when he says of Virgil that we find in his diction “all the grace of all the muses often flowering in one lonely word,” he says what is literally true of his own work. As a master of style his place is in the first rank among English classical poets. But his style is the perfection of art. His diction, like the diction of Milton and Gray, resembles mosaic work. With a touch here and a touch there, now from memory, now from unconscious assimilation, inlaying here an epithet and there a phrase, adding, subtracting, heightening, modifying, substituting one metaphor for another, developing what is latent in the suggestive imagery of a predecessor, laying under contribution the most intimate familiarity with what is best in the literature of the ancient and modern world, the unwearied artist toils patiently on till his precious mosaic work is without a flaw. All the resources of rhetoric are employed to give distinction to his style and every figure in rhetoric finds expression in his diction: Hypallage as in
The pillard dusk
Of sounding sycamores.
—Audley Court.
Paronomasia as in
The seawind sang
Shrill, chill with flakes of foam.
—Morte d’Arthur.
Oxymoron as
Behold them unbeheld, unheard
Hear all.
—Œnone.
Hyperbaton as in
The dew-impearled winds of dawn.
—Ode to Memory.
Metonymy as in
The bright death quiver’d at the victim’s throat.
—Dream of Fair Women.