that astonishing product of matchless talent and ingenuity Pope's
Translation of the Iliad; still a point was looked for at the end of
each second line, and the whole was, as it were, a sorites, or, if I
may exchange a logical for a grammatical metaphor, a conjunction
disjunctive, of epigrams. Meantime the matter and diction seemed to me
characterized not so much by poetic thoughts, as by thoughts
translated into the language of poetry. On this last point, I had
occasion to render my own thoughts gradually more and more plain to
myself, by frequent amicable disputes concerning Darwin's Botanic
Garden, which, for some years, was greatly extolled, not only by the
reading public in general, but even by those, whose genius and natural
robustness of understanding enabled them afterwards to act foremost in
dissipating these "painted mists" that occasionally rise from the
marshes at the foot of Parnassus. During my first Cambridge vacation,
I assisted a friend in a contribution for a literary society in
Devonshire: and in this I remember to have compared Darwin's work to
the Russian palace of ice, glittering, cold and transitory. In the
same essay too, I assigned sundry reasons, chiefly drawn from a
comparison of passages in the Latin poets with the original Greek,
from which they were borrowed, for the preference of Collins's odes to
those of Gray; and of the simile in Shakespeare

How like a younker or a prodigal
The scarfed bark puts from her native bay,
Hugg'd and embraced by the strumpet wind!
How like the prodigal doth she return,
With over-weather'd ribs and ragged sails,
Lean, rent, and beggar'd by the strumpet wind!
(Merch. of Ven. Act II. sc. 6.)