And roses from the veriest brake
May press the temples till they ache.'
But among the roses of his criticisms we look in vain for thorns. In style, it is true, these essays are halting and unequal. His adoption of the colloquial form for the expression of opinion to the public has never seemed to us remarkably felicitous, in spite of its venerable precedents. Where his imagery becomes lofty and his flow of thought should be continuous, we are indignant at its sudden arrest, and involuntarily devote the intruder to a temporary bungalow in Timbuctoo.
[pg 184]
It is refreshing to lose the moony Tennysonian sensuousness which induced, with Lowell's vigorous imagination, the blank artificiality of style which was visible in several of his early poems. There was a tendency, too, to the Byzantine liberty of gilding the bronze of our common words, a palpable longing after the ississimus of Latin adjectives, of whose softness our muscular and variegated language will not admit. Mr. Lowell's Sonnets, too, we could wish unwritten, not from any defect in their construction, but from a fancied want of congeniality between their character and his own. In spite of its Italian origin, the sonnet always seems to demand the severest classical outlines, both in spirit and expression, calm and steadfastly flowing without ripples or waves, a poem cut in the marble of stately cadences that imprison some vast and divine thought. Lowell is too elastic, impulsive, for a sonneteer. But considered apart from our peculiar ideas of the sonnet, the following is full of a very tender beauty:—
'I ask not for those thoughts that sudden leap
From being's sea, like the isle-seeming Kraken,
With whose great rise the ocean all is shaken,
And a heart-tremble quivers through the deep;