E. A. silsbee's remarks. 23 



Cowley, profiting by their ordering of the language, he 

 finished it in verse as Burke did in prose. With him the 

 door was closed for half a century. Burke did not take 

 us. We did not have genius. Gray says : 



" The meanest floweret of the vale 

 The simplest note that swells the gale, 

 The common sun, the air, the skies, 

 To him are opening Paradise." 



This ought to apply to every day, and in a rightly con- 

 stituted mind it does. Nature to a lover is never indif- 

 ferent, the darkest day or roughest or most slovenly that 

 ever was. One loves one's existence every day of one's 

 life and nature is a part of it. The language has scarcely 

 had a new note since, but has gone on, on the lines he 

 traced. It came to its maturity then, its majority, and a 

 language cannot have two lives. Much more passion 

 and sensibility have been wrought into verse, the changes 

 rung. Gray was cold, formal, limited, cramped by his 

 century; but a classic, a completion, an era, a departure. 

 Shelley prolonged the note, Byron sounded bugle notes, 

 trumpet tones. Coleridge wove subtle harmonies, the 

 finest ear since Milton. Tennyson, Browning, Swinbourne, 

 have wrung something out by screwing, pinching, squeezing 

 and stretching the language ; twisting and turning it in- 

 side out and upside down. Shelley's was a matchless 

 lyrical lire, kindled on the altar of a soul aflame. Byron 

 is his own "exulting and abounding river." Rusk in has 

 domesticated the coloring of poetry in prose, but he is 

 full of a calculated literary emotion. Carlyle has fired 

 the tongue with epic prose, picturesque intensity. It 

 thinks too much of itself, not of its subject, for a great 

 style. Men came down from their pedestals after the 

 opening generation of the century and were too conscious 

 to be great. 



