In fullness and resonance Taylor's diction resembles
that of the great orators, though it lacks their nervous energy. His
pathos is exquisitely tender, and his numerous similes have Spenser's
pictorial amplitude. Some of them have become commonplaces for
admiration, notably his description of the flight of the skylark, and
the sentence in which he compares the gradual awakening of the human
faculties to the sunrise, which "first opens a little eye of heaven, and
sends away the spirits of darkness, and gives light to a cock, and calls
up the lark to matins, and by and by gilds the fringes of a cloud, and
peeps over the eastern hills." Perhaps the most impressive single
passage of Taylor's is the opening chapter in _Holy Dying_. From the
midst of the sickening paraphernalia of death which he there accumulates
rises that delicate image of the fading rose, one of the most perfect
things in its wording in all our prose literature. "But so have I seen a
rose newly springing from the clefts of its hood, and at first it was as
fair as the morning, and full with the dew of heaven as a lamb's fleece;
but when a ruder breath had forced open its virgin modesty, and
dismantled its too youthful and unripe retirements, it began to put on
darkness and to decline to softness and the symptoms of a sickly age; it
bowed the head and broke its stock; and at night, having lost some of
its leaves and all its beauty, it fell into the portion of weeds and
outworn faces.
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