We do not bring with us out of our childhood the fibre of idiomatic English
which our fathers bequeathed to us. A boy's English is diluted
before it has become strong enough for him to make up his mind clearly
as to the true taste of it. Our literature needs Anglo-Saxon iron, --
there is no ruddiness in its cheeks, and everywhere
a clear lack of the red corpuscles."
Lanier was more thoroughly at home in the Elizabethan age, however.
He reveled in its myriad-mindedness -- its adventures and exploits,
its chivalry and romance. The sonnets especially appealed to him, for they
abounded in conceits. One of the striking characteristics that he noted
in the leading men of that age was the union of strength and tenderness.
"All this love-making was manly," he says. "It was then as it is now,
that the bravest are the tenderest. . . . Stout and fine Walter Raleigh
pushes over to America, quite as ready to sigh a sonnet as to plant a colony.
Valorous Philip Sidney, who can write as dainty a sonnet as any lover
of them all, can at the same time dazzle the stern eyes of warriors
with deeds of manhood before Zuetphen and touch their hearts
to pity and admiration as he offers the cup of water -- himself being
grievously wounded and in a rage of thirst -- to the dying soldier
whose necessity is greater than his. Men's minds in this time were employed
with big questions; the old theory of the universe is just losing
its long hold upon the intellect, and people are busy with all space,
trying to apprehend the relation of their globe to the solar system.
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