No doubt smoothness is often confounded with, and mistaken for
finish; but you might have a mirror-like polish on the surface of a
statue, for instance, and yet the marble be full of inanity, or
vagueness, or even vulgarity of result--irrespective altogether of its
idea. The influence of Italian poetry reviving once more in the country,
roused such men as Wyat and Surrey to polish the sound of their verses;
but smoothness, I repeat, is not melody, and where the attention paid to
the outside of the form results in flatness, and, still worse, in
obscurity, as is the case with both of these poets, little is gained and
much is lost.
Each has paraphrased portions of Scripture, but with results of little
value; and there is nothing of a religious nature I care to quote from
either, except these five lines from an epistle of Sir Thomas Wyat's:
Thyself content with that is thee assigned,
And use it well that is to thee allotted;
Then seek no more out of thyself to find
The thing that thou hast sought so long before,
For thou shalt feel it sticking in thy mind.
Students of versification will allow me to remark that Sir Thomas was the
first English poet, so far as I know, who used the _terza rima_, Dante's
chief mode of rhyming: the above is too small a fragment to show that it
belongs to a poem in that manner.
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