give the idea of what
the peculiar power which lies in style is--Pindar, Virgil, Dante,
Milton. An example of the peculiar effect which these poets produce, you
can hardly give from German poetry. Examples enough you can give from
German poetry of the effect produced by genius, thought, and feeling
expressing themselves in clear language, simple language, passionate
language, eloquent language, with harmony and melody: but not of the
peculiar effect exercised by eminent power of style. Every reader of
Dante can at once call to mind what the peculiar effect I mean is; I
spoke of it in my lectures on translating Homer, and there I took an
example of it from Dante, who perhaps manifests it more eminently than
any other poet.

But from Milton, too, one may take examples of it abundantly; compare
this from Milton:--

"... nor sometimes forget
Those other two equal with me in fate,
So were I equall'd with them in renown,
Blind Thamyris and blind Maeonides--"[253]

with this from Goethe:--

"Es bildet ein Talent sich in der Stille,
Sich ein Character in dem Strom der Welt."[254]

Nothing can be better in its way than the style in which Goethe there
presents his thought, but it is the style of prose as much as of poetry;
it is lucid, harmonious, earnest, eloquent, but it has not received that
peculiar kneading, heightening, and recasting which is observable in the
style of the passage from Milton--a style which seems to have for its
cause a certain pressure of emotion, and an ever-surging, yet bridled,
excitement in the poet, giving a special intensity to his way of
delivering himself. In poetical races and epochs this turn for style is
peculiarly observable; and perhaps it is only on condition of having
this somewhat heightened and difficult manner, so different from the
plain manner of prose, that poetry gets the privilege of being loosed,
at its best moments, into that perfectly simple, limpid style, which is
the supreme style of all, but the simplicity of which is still not the
simplicity of prose. The simplicity of Menander's[255] style is the
simplicity of prose, and is the same kind of simplicity as that which
Goethe's style, in the passage I have quoted, exhibits; but Menander
does not belong to a great poetical moment, he comes too late for it; it
is the simple passages in poets like Pindar or Dante which are perfect,
being masterpieces of _poetical_ simplicity. One may say the same of the
simp