Page:The Spirit of the Age.djvu/401

Rh names, and thinks that, flung on heaps, they make up a fine poem. This dissipated, fulsome, painted, patch-work style may succeed in the levity and languor of the boudoir, or might have been adapted to the Pavilions of royalty, but it is not the style of Parnassus, nor a passport to Immortality. It is not the taste of the ancients, "'tis not classical lore"nor the fashion of Tibullus, or Theocritus, or Anacreon, or Virgil, or Ariosto, or Pope, or Byron, or any great writer among the living or the dead, but it is the style of our English Anacreon, and it is (or was) the fashion of the day! Let one example (and that an admired one) taken from Lalla Rookh, suffice to explain the mystery and soften the harshness of the foregoing criticism.

"Now upon Syria's land of roses &ensp;Softly the light of eve reposes, &ensp;And like a glory, the broad sun &ensp;Hangs over sainted Lebanon: &ensp;Whose head in wintry grandeur towers, &ensp;And whitens with eternal sleet, &ensp;While summer, in a vale of flowers, &ensp;Is sleeping rosy at his feet. To one who look'd from upper air, &ensp;O'er all th' enchanted regions there, &ensp;How beauteous must have been the glow, &ensp;The life, the sparkling from below!