Worse than all, does not his brush linger more lovingly along
the rosy contours of his sirens than on the modest wimples of the Wise
Virgins? "The general end of the book," he tells us in his Dedication to
Sir Walter Raleigh, "is to fashion a gentleman of noble person in
virtuous and gentle discipline." But a little further on he evidently has
a qualm, as he thinks how generously he had interpreted his promise of
cuts: "To some I know this method will seem displeasant, which had rather
have good discipline delivered plainly in way of precepts or sermoned at
large,[299] as they use, than thus cloudily enwrapped in allegorical
devices." Lord Burleigh was of this way of thinking, undoubtedly, but how
could poor Clarion help it? Has he not said,
"And whatso else, _of virtue good or ill,_
Grew in that garden, fetcht from far away,
Of every one he takes and tastes at will,
And on their pleasures greedily doth prey"?
One sometimes feels in reading him as if he were the pure sense of the
beautiful incarnated to the one end that he might interpret it to our
duller perceptions So exquisite was his sensibility,[300] that with him
sensation and intellection seem identical, and we "can almost say his
body thought." This subtle interfusion of sense with spirit it is that
gives his poetry a crystalline purity without lack of warmth.
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