. The result is apt to be an elaborate or stately style.
Lowell's style is eminently characterized by a play of the imagination.
His essay on Spenser begins as follows: "Chaucer had been in his grave
one hundred and fifty years ere England had secreted choice material
enough for the making of another great poet. The nature of men living
together in societies, as of the individual man, seems to have its
periodic ebbs and floods, its oscillations between the ideal and the
matter-of-fact, so that the doubtful boundary line of shore between them
is in one generation a hard sandy actuality strewn only with such
remembrances of beauty as a dead sea-moss here and there, and in the
next is whelmed with those lacelike curves of ever-gaining,
ever-receding foam, and that dance of joyous spray which for a moment
catches and holds the sunshine."

When the imagination is ill-governed, and especially in the case of
inexperienced writers, the resulting style is apt to be florid or
bombastic. The following passage from Headley's "Sacred Mountains,"
connected with a description of the crucifixion, is imaginative
extravagance,--a vain, artificial effort at the sublime: "I know not but
all the radiant ranks on high, and even Gabriel himself, turned with the
deepest solicitude to the Father's face, to see if He was calm and
untroubled amid it all. I know not but His composed brow and serene
majesty were all that restrained Heaven from one universal shriek of
horror when they heard groans on Calvary--dying groans. I know not but
they thought God had given His glory to another, but one thing I _do_
know, that when they saw through the vast design, comprehended the
stupendous scene, the hills of God shook to a shout that never before
rang over their bright tops, and the crystal sea trembled to a song that
had never before stirred its bright depths, and the 'Glory to God in the
Highest' was a sevenfold chorus of hallelujahs and harping symphonies."
Thoughtful writers of refined taste are more reserved and reverent in
speaking of occurrences in the celestial world.

(3) Again, the sensibilities may be in the ascendant. There is then a
quick and full response to the beauties of nature and human life. The
style becomes warm, graphic, glowing, pictorial. Unless held in check
by intellectual culture, an excess of sensibility is likely to
degenerate into sentimentalism. When combined with judgment and
imagination, as in the case of Ruskin, an emoti