The following extract gives a fair sample of the style:—
“The enjoyments and delights of a country life have been sung by poets in all ages, and it is our own fault if we find the country irksome, or less agreeable than a crowded metropolis. It affords many resources of a most agreeable nature, to those who seek for rational and tranquil enjoyments. A beautiful prospect, a walk by the side of a river in fine weather, in the agreeable shade of a wood or cool valley, have great charms for those who are fond of the country. We may then exclaim with Virgil,—
‘O, qui me gelidis convallibus Haemi
Sistat, et ingenti ramorum protegat umbra!’”
But even the Virgilian quotation does not give it the flavor of White’s pages.
X
LUCID LITERATURE
NOTHING can make up in a writer for the want of lucidity. It is one of the cardinal literary virtues. If the page is not clear, if we see through it as through a glass darkly, if there is the least blur or opacity, the work to that extent is condemned. It is a false notion that some thoughts or ideas are necessarily obscure, or complex, or involved. Ideas are what we make them. If we think obscurely, our ideas are obscure; if one’s mental activity is complex, his ideas are complex. Always is the mind of the writer the medium through which we see his matter. Such a poet as George Meredith thinks obscurely. There is a large blind spot in his mind, so that at times an almost total eclipse passes over his page. Strain one’s vision as one may, one cannot make out just what he is trying to say. Then there are lucid intervals—strong, telling lines; then the shadow falls again and the reader is groping in the dark. The difficulty is never innate in his subject, but is in the poet’s use of language, as if at times he caught at words blindly and used them without reference to their accepted meanings, as when be says of the skylark, “He drinks his hurried flight and drops.” How can one adjust his mind to the notion of a bird drinking its own flight?
Or take this puzzle:—
“Vermilion wings, by distance held