The merry little gnats (Tipulidæ minimæ) I have myself often watched in an April shower, evidently "dancing the hayes" in and out between the falling drops, unwetted, or, rather, un-down-dashed by rocks of water many times larger than their whole bodies.
OF STYLE Sunday, January 25, 1817
A valuable remark has just struck me on reading Milton's beautiful passage on true eloquence, his apology for Smectymnuus. "For me, reader, though I cannot say," etc.—first, to shew the vastly greater numbers of admirable passages, in our elder writers, that may be gotten by heart as the most exquisite poems; and to point out the great intellectual advantage of this reading, over the gliding smoothly on through a whole volume of equability. But still, it will be said, there is an antiquity, an oddness in the style. Granted; but hear this same passage from the Smectymnuus, or this, or this. Every one would know at first hearing that they were not written by Gibbon, Hume, Johnson, or Robertson. But why? Are they not pure English? Aye! incomparably more so! Are not the words precisely appropriate, so that you cannot change them without changing the force and meaning? Aye! But are they not even now intelligible to man, woman, and child? Aye! there is no riddle-my-ree in them. What, then, is it? The unnatural, false, affected style of the moderns that makes sense and simplicity oddness.
OBDUCTÂ FRONTE SENECTUS
Even to a sense of shrinking, I felt in this man's face and figure what a shape comes to view when age has dried away the mask from a bad, depraved man, and flesh and colour no longer conceal or palliate the traits of the countenance. Then shows itself the indurated nerve; stiff and rigid in all its ugliness the inflexible muscle; then quiver the naked lips, the cold, the loveless; then blinks the turbid eye, whose glance no longer pliant fixes, abides in its evil expression. Then lie on the powerless forehead the wrinkles of suspicion and fear, and conscience-stung watchfulness. Contrast this with the countenance of Mrs. Gillman's mother as she once described it to me. This for "Puff and Slander,"[G] Highgate, 1817.
A "KINGDOM-OF-HEAVENITE"