Page:Genius, and other essays.djvu/108

GENIUS AND OTHER ESSAYS the progress of his more intellectual and elevated creations.

One of the first qualities which should impress the reader of these verses is the thorough purity and simplicity of their English idiom. In prose and poetry, their author belonged to the school which clings to the natural order and genius of the English tongue, and in both departments of literature he easily ranked with the foremost. Nowadays, when there is so much of what is called word-painting, so much straining after effect through use of words painfully chosen for sound or color, it is difficult to estimate properly the limpid, translucent clearness of Landor's verse. It is Corinthian rather than Composite, and seems to disdain any resort to eccentric or meretricious devices. Doubtless its maker might have put words together as curiously as any imitator of a great poet's youthful style; but "doubtless," as Thomas Fuller would say, he "never did," however tempted by unlimited power of language, and with an exhaustless vocabulary at his control.

Though graven in the purest English, many of these gems reflect the manner of those Latin lyrists, with whom their author, in his gownsman days, became so familiar,—so imbued with their blithe and delicate spirit, that he may dispute with rare old Robert Herrick the title of the British Catullus. His epigrams are by turns playful and spleenful, and pointed as those of Martial; but among these, and in the lightness of his festive or amatory strains, there often is little of that emotion which takes the heart captive. [94]