as Meleager repeatedly calls it in one of his curious new compound
epithets,[27] is perpetually about him, and rains its petals over the
banqueting-table and the myrrh-drenched doorway.[28] For a moment
Meleager can be piercingly simple; and then the fantastic mood comes
over him again, and emotion dissolves in a mist of metaphors. But even
when he is most fantastic the unfailing beauty of his rhythms and
grace of his language remind us that we are still in the presence of a
real art.

The pattern set by Meleager was followed by later poets; and little
more would remain to say were it not necessary to notice the brief
renascence of amatory poetry in the sixth century. The poets of that
period take a high place in the second rank; and one, Paulus
Silentiarius, has a special interest among them as being at once the
most antique in his workmanship and the most modern in his sentiment.
One of his epigrams is like an early poem of Shakespeare's;[29]
another has in a singular degree the manner and movement of a sonnet
by Rossetti.[30] This group of epigrammatists brought back a phantom
of freshness into the old forms; once more the epigram becomes full of
pretty rhythms and fancies, but they are now more artificial; set
beside work of the best period they come out clumsy and heavy.
Language is no longer vivid and natural; the colour is a little
dimmed, the tone a little forced. As the painter's art had disappeared
into that of the worker in mosaic, so the language of poetry was no
longer a living stream, but a treasury of glittering words. Verse-
writers studied it carefully and used it cleverly, but never could
make up for the want of free movement of hand by any laborious
minuteness of tessellation. Yet if removed from the side of their
great models they are graceful enough, with a prettiness that recalls
and probably in many cases is copied from the novelists of the fourth