The white heat of austere, restrained passion is here, it is the sublimation of the Latin model. This surely is English as we would have her written, that which is rightly said and therefore sounds rightly. This is one of those certain occasions on which prose can bear a great deal of poetry: indeed there is more real poetry latent in the cadences of this paragraph than in many so-called poems of to-day.
Sir Sidney Colvin happily contrasts Landor's twilight with that more famous one of Keats:
"Within how few minutes has the night closed in upon us! Nothing is left discernible of the promontories, or the long irregular breakers under them. We have before us only a faint glimmering from the shells in our path, and from the blossoms of the arbutus."
"The presence of the twilight and its spell," he very justly comments, "are in the work of Landor not less keenly felt and realised than in the work of Keats, only they are felt and realised in a widely different manner."
This difference is simply that which lies between the romantic and the classical. Landor will never trust himself to go beyond a bare statement of fact, but beauty is no less implicit in the architecture of straight lines than in the architecture of adornments and embellishments. His aphorisms have passed into our common speech and men call up many beautifully coined phrases from the depths of their consciousness about life and death, forgetful of their source, which are attributable to Landor.
"To stand upon one's guard against Death exasperates her malice, and protracts our sufferings"; "Goodness does not more certainly make men happy than happiness makes them good"; "Those who are quite satisfied sit still and do nothing; those who are not quite satisfied are the sole benefactors of the world"; "We often hear that such or such a thing 'is not worth an old song.' Alas! how very few things are! What precious recollections do some of them awaken! What pleasurable tears do they excite? They purify the stream of life; they can delay it on its shelves and rapids; they can turn it back again to the soft moss amidst which its sources issue."
"Friendship is a vase, which, when it is flamed by heat, or violence, or accident, may as well be broken at once; it never can be trusted after. The more graceful and ornamental it was, the more clearly do we discern the hopelessness of restoring it to its former state. Coarse stones, if they are fractured, may be cemented again; precious ones never."
Reading exquisite thoughts like these clothed in such a perfectly firm manner, we are led to think of the values of phrases and words which, like many of our blessings, lie unrecognised.
"How carelessly, for example, do we say, 'I am delighted to hear from you.' No other language has this beautiful expression, which, like some of the most lovely flowers, loses its charm for want of close inspection."
The classical method, you will notice again, of getting close to the object and keeping one's eyes on it, not moving away to such a distance that all the beauty lies in the vagueness and mystery of the scene. Just as in his dramatic and narrative conversations he springs easily from age to age, shedding a flood of new light on historical episodes, so in his reflective and discursive notes he touches on every topic of human interest, religion, fame, death, love, manners, society, politics, literature; as a critic he moves easily, with felicity of expression and breadth of survey, "the herald of the gods," with a sure sense of what is required of him.