Oh, what is heaven but the fellowshipHe goes on to denounce “these lines that lift their back up in the middle, span-worm lines, we may call them,” of which he says that “they have invaded some of our recent poetry as the canker-worms gather on our elms in June.” It does not stand recorded how Holmes was affected by Coleridge's “Christabel,” which emancipated English poetry from the shadow of Pope; but it is pretty certain that he would not have approved of it. Lyrical and lilting measures did not ordinarily appeal to him, except in the case of Moore, whose lilt has a definite beat, and whose verses he used in later life to read to young people who had almost forgotten the Irish poet's name. It was perhaps partly a result of all this that Holmes was, according to the Quarterly Review, “at one time in disrepute with the more advanced of his countrymen. He was accused ”
Of minds that each can stand against the world
By its own meek and incorruptible will?
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instance, “Can any ear reconcile itself to the last of these three lines of Emerson's:”
Macmillan, 1900.
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