Science has accomplished few things more wonderful than that of crossing over the vast spaces of the universe, and revealing to us the chemical composition of the celestial atmospheres.
End of Required Reading for December.
THE LAUREATE POETS.
BY REV. A. E. WINSHIP.
CHAPTER II.
Samuel Daniel, Spenser’s successor as laureate, is unknown to the general reader, though by the reader of his time he was well considered, and literary critics of every age have admired him. He has had no superior in the correct, classic use of English. Lowell says that in two hundred years not a dozen of his words or turns of phrase have become obsolete, a thing that can not be said, probably, of any other English writer. He failed not in rhythmic skill, or linguistic art, but in that element which marks the literary genius’ power to speak to his neighbors in such a way as to speak to all times and climes. Shakspere’s words are as much at home in one nation or century as another. Bunyan had a similar skill, so had Burns, but Daniel had it not. In comparing him with men of permanent literary fame we see the superiority of processes to facts, of methods to transient results.
Daniel’s lines are so exquisite that in every age the great poets have not only been his admirers, but have made systematic effort to revivify his lines. In the time of Hazlitt, he secured the coöperation of Lamb and Coleridge, and the three combined their talent and friends to resurrect his fame by placing beneath his poems their own genius and reputation, but they could not call his verses from the oblivion in which they had been decently interred.