So argue also, probably, the popular poets,
to whose "luxuriant fancy" everything suggests anything, and thought
plays leap-frog with thought down one page and up the next, till
one fancies at moments that they had got permission from the higher
powers, before looking at the universe, to stir it all up a few times
with a spoon. It is notorious, of course, that poets and preachers
alike pride themselves upon this method of astonishing; that
the former call it, "seeing the infinite in the finite;" the
latter--"pressing secular matters into the service of the sanctuary,"
and other pretty phrases which, for reverence' sake, shall be omitted.
No doubt they have their reasons and their reward. The style takes;
the style pays; and what more would you have? Let them go on
rejoicing, in spite of the cynical pedants in the Saturday Review, who
dare to accuse (will it be believed?) these luminaries of the age
of talking merely irreverent nonsense. Meanwhile, so evident is the
success (sole test of merit) which has attended the new method, that
it is worth while trying whether it will not be as taking in the novel
as it is in the chapel; and therefore the reader is requested to pay
special attention to the following paragraph, modelled carefully after
the exordiums of a famous Irish preacher, now drawing crowded houses
at the West End of Town. As thus;--"It is the pleasant month of May,
when, as in old Chaucer's time, the--
"Smale foules maken melodie,
That slepen alle night with open eye
So priketh hem nature in their corages.
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