70 LITEEAET VAITJES 



or on cryptic language. Did you ever try to row 

 a boat in water in which, lay a sodden fleece of 

 newly fallen snow ? I find the reading of certain 

 books like that. Some of Browning's poems im- 

 pede my mind in that way. 



Force of impact — that is another matter ; that 

 warms and quickens the mind. Browning's " How 

 they brought the Good News from Ghent " makes 

 the mind hot by its rush and power. There is no 

 mere mechanical friction of elliptical sentences and 

 obscure allusions here. 



Yes, the style that does not tire us is better than 

 the style that does. Thus Arnold's style is better than 

 Walter Pater's, because it is easier to follow ; it is not 

 so conscious of itself ; it is not so obviously studied. 

 Pater studied words ; Arnold studied ideas. Pater 

 sacrificed the more familiar democratic traits of 

 language — ease, simplicity, flexibility, transparency 

 — to his passion for the more choice aristocratic 

 features, — the perfumed, the academic, the highly 

 wrought. Again, I find Arnold's style less fatiguing 

 than Lowell's, because it has more current, more 

 continuity of thought, and is freer from concetti and 

 mere surface sparkle. I find Swinburne's prose 

 more tiresome than that of any contemporary Brit- 

 ish critic, because of its inflated polysyllabic charac- 

 ter, and his poetry more cloying than that of any 

 other poet, because of its almost abnormal lilt and 

 facility ; it has a pathological fluidity ; it seems as 

 though, when he begins to write verse, his whole 

 mental structure is in danger of melting down and 



