In his power of crystallising commonplaces he stands next to Pope, in subtle felicity of expression beside Virgil. And, when he says of Virgil that we find in his diction “all the grace of all the muses often flowering in one lonely word,” he says what is literally true of his own work. As a master of style his place is in the first rank among English classical poets. But his style is the perfection of art. His diction, like the diction of Milton and Gray, resembles mosaic work. With a touch here and a touch there, now from memory, now from unconscious assimilation, inlaying here an epithet and there a phrase, adding, subtracting, heightening, modifying, substituting one metaphor for another, developing what is latent in the suggestive imagery of a predecessor, laying under contribution the most intimate familiarity with what is best in the literature of the ancient and modern world, the unwearied artist toils patiently on till his precious mosaic work is without a flaw. All the resources of rhetoric are employed to give distinction to his style and every figure in rhetoric finds expression in his diction: Hypallage as in _The pillard dusk_ Of sounding sycamores. —_Audley Court_. Paronomasia as in The seawind sang _Shrill, chill_ with flakes of foam. —_Morte d’Arthur_. Oxymoron as _Behold_ them _unbeheld, unheard Hear_ all. —_Œnone._ Hyperbaton as in The _dew-impearled_ winds of dawn. —_Ode to Memory._ Metonymy as in The _bright death_ quiver’d at the victim’s throat. —_Dream of Fair Women_. or in For some three _careless moans_ The summer pilot of an empty heart. —_Gardener’s Daughter_. No poet since Milton has employed what is known as Onomatopoeia with so much effect. Not to go farther than the poems of 1842, we have in the _Morte d’Arthur_:— So all day long the noise of battle _rolled Among the mountains by the winter sea;_ or _Dry clashed_ his harness in the icy caves And _barren chasms_, and all to left and right The _bare black cliff clang’d round_ him, as he bas’d His feet _on juts of slippery crag that rang Sharp-smitten with the dint of armed heels—_ or the exquisite I heard the _water lapping on the crag,_ And the _long ripple washing in the reeds._ So in _The Dying Swan,_ And _the wavy swell of the soughing reeds._ See too the whole of _Oriana_ and the description of the dance at the beginning of _The Vision of Sin._