Page:Stories after Nature.pdf/15

Rh much of the charm and something of the weakness natural to the first note of a songbird whose wings have yet to grow and whose notes have yet to deepen; yet in its first flutterings and twitterings there is a nameless grace, a beauty undefinable, which belongs only to the infancy of genius as it belongs only to the infancy of life. To a reader of the age at which this book was written it will seem—or so at least it seemed to me—'perfect in grace and power, tender and exquisite in choice of language, full of a noble and masculine delicacy in feeling and purpose'; and he will be ready to attribute the utter neglect which has befallen it simply 'to the imbecile caprice of hazard and opinion.' Even then, however, he will perceive, if there be in him any critical judgment or any promise of such faculty to come, that the style of these stories is too near poetry to be really praiseworthy as prose; that they halt between two kinds of merit. At times they will seem to him almost to attain the