212 NOTES ON STYLE 



By them, in their borrowed garb, Love, though not wholly blind, as Poets 

 wrong him, yet having but one eye, as being an archer aiming, and that 

 eye not the quickest in this dark region here below, which is not Love's 

 proper sphere, partly out of the simplicity and credulity which is natural 

 to him, often deceived, embraces and consorts him with the obvious and 

 suborned striplings, as if they were his mother's own sons, for so he 

 thinks them. But after a while, as his manner is, when soaring up into 

 the high tower of his Apogaeum, above the shadow of the earth, he darts 

 out the rays of his most piercing eyesight, upon the impostures and trim 

 disguises that were used with him, and discerns that this is not his 

 genuine brother, as he imagined : he has no longer the power to hold 

 fellowship with such a personated mate ; for straight his arrows lose 

 their golden heads and shed their purple feathers, his silken braids un- 

 twine, and slip their knots, and that original and fiery virtue given him 

 by Fate all on a sudden goes out, and leaves him undeified and despoiled 

 of all his force ; till, finding Anteros at last, he kindles and repairs the 

 almost faded ammunition of his deity, by the reflection of a co-equal and 

 homogeneal fire. Thus mine author sung it to me ; and by the leave of 

 those who would be counted the only grave ones, this is no mere ama- 

 torious novel (though to be wise and skilful in these matters, men, 

 heretofore of greatest name in virtue, have esteemed it one of the highest 

 arcs that human contemplation, circling upwards, can make from the 

 globy sea whereon she stands) : but this is a deep and serious verity, 

 showing that love in marriage cannot live nor subsist unless it be mutual. 



If we inquire what English prose gained in this humanistic 

 period, we shall find that the range and compass of the lan- 

 guage were widely extended, that new and richer rhythms 

 were added to its cadences, and that its capacity for the 

 construction of majestic monumental sentences was proved. 



There are sicknesses that walk in darkness; and there are exter- 

 minating angels, that fly wrapt up in the curtains of immateriality and 

 an uncommunicating nature ; whom we cannot see, but we feel their 

 force, and sink under their sword ; and from heaven the veil descends 

 that wraps our heads in the fatal sentence. 



It was surely a great gain to have learned to write thus 

 with Jeremy Taylor, or as thus with Thomas Browne : 



But man is a noble animal, splendid in ashes, and pompous in the 

 grave, solemnising nativities and deaths with equal lustre, nor omitting 

 ceremonies of bravery in the infamy of his nature. 



