We share, too, in the delight of his first audience on reading:
“The lines of Dante seem to answer his every mood: sometimes they have the compressed implacability of his lips, sometimes they ring like an angry gauntlet thrown down in defiance, and sometimes they soften or tremble as if that stern nature would let its depth of pity show itself only in a quiver of the voice.”
“So in ‘Paradise Lost’ not only is there the pomp of long passages that move with the stately glitter of Milton’s own angelic squadrons, but if you meet anywhere a single verse, that, too, is obstinately epic, and you recognize it by its march as certainly as you know a friend by his walk.”
“Who can doubt the innate charm of rhyme whose eye has ever been delighted by the visible consonance of a tree growing at once toward an upward and a downward heaven, on the edge of the unrippled river; or as the kingfisher flits from shore to shore, his silent echo flies under him and completes the vanishing couplet in the visionary world below.”
“Every desire of the heart finds its gratification in the poet because he always speaks imaginatively and satisfies ideal hungers.”
And see, too, how the “powers of critical appreciation” that Professor Norton has mentioned were bursting into blossom and giving promise of the golden harvest to come:
“Sir Thomas Browne, * * * a man who gives proof of more imagination than any other Englishman except Shakspeare.”
For subtlety and depth of insight Lowell has never excelled this early example, nor has he ever outdone the critical estimate, so true and so terse, of his final pronouncement upon Pope:
“Measured by any high standard of imagination, he will be found wanting; tried by any test of wit, he is unrivaled.”
And what of such a shining felicity as where he meets Sir Thomas Browne on common ground and the author of “Religio Medici” gravely smiles and acknowledges kinship: