Introduction 



writer, owes no little to the secret practice of verse. " I think," he 

 says, " that Walton's prose owes much of its charm to the poetic 

 sentiment in him which was denied a refuge in verse, and that his 

 practice in metres may have given to his happier periods a measure 

 and a music they would otherwise have wanted." 



Lowell's own success and failure were so parallel to this that his 

 judgment is the more authoritative. His remarks on Walton's Elegy 

 upon Donne are equally worth noting. "The versification of this," 

 he says, " if sometimes rather stiff, is for the most part firm and 



lix 



