Enoch's white horse, and Enoch's ocean-spoil
In ocean-smelling osier--

(_i.e._ in a fish-basket)

--and his face
Rough-reddened with a thousand winter gales,
Not only to the market town were known,
But in the leafy lanes beyond the down
Far as the portal-warding lion-whelp
And peacock yewtree of the lonely Hall
Whose Friday fare was Enoch's ministering,

why, then we feel that the vehicle is altogether too pompous for its
load, and those who make speech too pompous for its content commit,
albeit in varying degrees, the error of Defoe's religious lady who,
seeing a bottle of over-ripe beer explode and cork and froth fly up to
the ceiling, cried out, 'O, the wonders of Omnipotent Power!' The poet
who commends fresh fish to us as 'ocean-spoil' can cast no stone at his
brother who writes of them as 'the finny denizens of the deep,' or even
at his cousin the journalist, who exalts the oyster into a 'succulent
bivalve'--

The feathered tribes on pinions cleave the air;
Not so the mackerel, and, still less, the bear!

I believe this difficulty, which verse, by nature and origin emotional,
encounters in dealing with ordinary unemotional narrative, to lie as a
technical reason at the bottom of Horace's advice to the writer of Epic
to plunge _in medias res_, thus avoiding flat preparative and catching at