E. A. silsbee's remarks. 21 



mannered. The style never grows clear. With the finest 

 touches possible, the richest expression and freshest, an 

 intimacy with Nature almost his own, she never gave him 

 her pass key. He is always a pretty boy playing with 

 her ringlets, never a full grown man. Such exquisite 

 things as he has done, such jewelry of literature, such 

 honest sentiment, such extensive knowledge, such wide 

 sympathy, such mouthpiece and mirror of the times, 

 never its leader, such snatches and rhymes, such verbal 

 felicity, such graces like a girl, such searching and reach 

 of sentiment, delicacy, color, such an iridescent fancy, 

 feeling for his art, such a figure coming on the top of all 

 time in poetry and knitting its yarn and web and holding 

 the skein to the light, all marred by lack of manliness in 

 style — le style c'est Vhomme — of fibre, largeness, passion 

 and breadth : — a flute-like note, not a trumpet tone, 

 never a transparency to the God within and never a pure 

 mirror to the universe without. The note was lost with 

 the last great generation, the instrument broken, the edi- 

 fice cast down, and we are gleaning the ruins, or devel- 

 oping the dispensation and have not exhausted its teaching. 

 Nature will not give us another revelation just now. She 

 is waiting for us to assimilate the last. 



The "In Memoriam" is overwrought, no spontaneity, 

 making capital out of its grief, preaching about it, and 

 curiously probing it, mosaic, Cellini work compared to 

 true sculpture, embroidery to painting, no perspective, 

 freshness, subordinating workmanship to growth, process to 

 organism, ingenious, ornate. The "Idylls of the King" are 

 strained, artificial in atmosphere. Byron is a god through 

 large and lifting passion, so are Keats, Shelley, Words- 

 worth in inspiration if not in form, — all were healthful 

 then; Scott, Coleridge, Campbell, Moore, each in his 

 kind, all divinities and possessed. They were rounded 



