That swells the seedling leaf and sapling man.

He, nevertheless, who was able, in high company, to hail the sea with
such fine verse, was not ashamed, in low company, to sing the famous
absurdities about "the lilies and languors of virtue and the roses and
raptures of vice," with many and many a passage of like character. I
think it more generous, seeing I have differed so much from the
Nineteenth Century's chorus of excessive praise, to quote little from the
vacant, the paltry, the silly--no word is so fit as that last little
word--among his pages. Therefore, I have justified my praise, but not my
blame. It is for the reader to turn to the justifying pages: to "A Song
of Italy," "Les Noyades," "Hermaphroditus," "Satia te Sanguine," "Kissing
her Hair," "An Interlude," "In a Garden," or such a stanza as the one
beginning

O thought illimitable and infinite heart
Whose blood is life in limbs indissolute
That all keep heartless thine invisible part
And inextirpable thy viewless root
Whence all sweet shafts of green and each thy dart
Of sharpening leaf and bud resundering shoot.

It is for the reader who has preserved rectitude of intellect, sincerity
of heart, dignity of nerves, unhurried thoughts, an unexcited heart, and
an ardour for poetry, to judge between such poems and an authentic
passion, between such poems and truth, I will add between such poems and
beauty.

Imagery is a great part of poetry; but out, alas! vocabulary has here too
the upper hand. For in what is still sometimes called the magnificent