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He is not, indeed, deficient, as the excerpt given shows, in dignity and weightiness, but neither there nor elsewhere has he any of the finer qualities of style, his rhythm being harsh and unmusical, his diction cumbrous and diffuse.
But he was at once confronted by this obstacle: so elaborately had the image of the moon reflected in the surf been rendered in the prose note—so entirely did the prose matter seem to be the inevitable and the final incarnation of the thought—that it appeared impossible to escape from it into the movement and the diction proper to poetry.
Some also confine their attention to the smoothness and equability of their periods, and aim at a style which is perfectly neat and clear: while others affect a harshness, and severity of diction, and to give a gloomy cast to their language: and as we have already observed that some endeavour to be nervous and majestic, others neat and simple, and some to be smooth and florid, it necessarily follows that there must be as many different kinds of Orators, as there are of Eloquence.
But however this may account for his insight the heart seeing farther than the head it will not account for his literary qualities. Of all his contemporaries, Goldsmith and Burke excepted, no one is a greater master of a pure prose style than Boswell, and for ease of narrative, felicity of phrase, and rounded diction he is incomparable.
It is a fine and laborious manufacture, which can scarcely ever be made in a hurry; and the faults which it has, may, for the most part, be set down to bad taste or incapacity, rather than to carelessness or oversight. With Mr. Wordsworth and his friends it is plain that their peculiarities of diction are things of choice, and not of accident.
Thus the greatest of poets has described it, in lines universally admired for the vigor and felicity of their diction, and still more valuable on account of the just notion which they convey of the art in which he excelled: "As imagination bodies forth The forms of things unknown, the poet's pen Turns them to shapes, and gives to airy nothing A local habitation and a name."
The technique of violin playing can best be acquired before the virtuoso appears in public, although no amount of training in itself will make a great violinist, but the basic elements of acting, grace, diction, etc., can just as well be acquired behind the footlights and so many great actors have acquired them, as many of the greatest have ignored them.
Although dramatic in form the poem is not continuously, directly, and compactly dramatic in movement. It cannot be converted into a play without being radically changed in structure and in the form of its diction.
Time was a somewhat, and so was space, though neither of them possessed being. In the Stoic treatment of the proposition, grammar was very much mixed up with logic. They had a wide name which applied to any part of diction, whether a word or words, a sentence, or even a syllogism. This we shall render by "dict."
"But in the elegant and expressive diction of the late the late Overland Red Summers, 'I think you're a bum scout." And they shook hands, laughing as they turned to climb the trail. Near the crest, Overland again paused. "Say, Billy, you said the 'late' Overland Red Summers. You took particular noise to make me hear that word 'late. Have you got any objections to explainin' that there idea?
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