But when he was admonished by his subject to
descend, he came down gently circling in the air and singing to the
ground, like a lark melodious in her mounting and continuing her song
till she alights, still preparing for a higher flight at her next sally,
and tuning her voice to better music." This is charming, and yet even
this wants the ethereal tincture that pervades the style of Jeremy
Taylor, making it, as Burke said of Sheridan's eloquence, "neither prose
nor poetry, but something better than either." Let us compare Taylor's
treatment of the same image: "For so have I seen a lark rising from his
bed of grass and soaring upwards, singing as he rises, and hopes to get
to heaven and climb above the clouds; but the poor bird was beaten back
by the loud sighings of an eastern wind, and his motion made irregular
and inconstant, descending more at every breath of the tempest than it
could recover by the libration and frequent weighing of his wings, till
the little creature was forced to sit down and pant, and stay till the
storm was over, and then it made a prosperous flight, and did rise and
sing as if it had learned music and motion of an angel as he passed
sometimes through the air about his ministries here below." Taylor's
fault is that his sentences too often smell of the library, but what an
open air is here! How unpremeditated it all seems! How carelessly he
knots each new thought, as it comes, to the one before it with an _and_,
like a girl making lace! And what a slidingly musical use he makes of the
sibilants with which our language is unjustly taxed by those who can only
make them hiss, not sing! There are twelve of them in the first twenty
words, fifteen of which are monsyllables.
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