dor, "was always my amusement, prose my study and
business." In his thirtieth year he lived in the woods, "did not
exchange twelve sentences with men," and wrote "Gebir," his most
elaborate and ambitious poem, which Southey took as a model in blank
verse, and which a Boston critic wonders whether anyone ever read
through. "Pericles and Aspasia," and the finest of his "Imaginary
Conversations," were the flowering of half a century of thought. There
are few readers who do not prefer Landor's prose to his verse, for in
the former he does not aim at the dramatic: the passion peculiar to
verse is not congenial to his genius. He sympathizes most fully with men
and women in repose, when intellect, not the heart, rules. His prose has
all the purity of outline and harmony of Greek plastic art. He could not
wield the painter's brush, but the great sculptor had yet power to
depict the grief of a "Niobe," the agony of the "Laocooen," or the
majesty of a "Moses." Like a sculptor, he rarely groups more than two
figures.

It is satisfactory then to know that in the zenith of physical strength
Landor was at his noblest and best, for his example is a forcible
protest against the feverish enthusiasm of young American authors, who
wear out their lives in the struggle to be famous at the age of Keats,
never remembering that "there must be a good deal of movement and
shuffling before there is any rising from the ground; and those who have
the longest wings have the most difficulty in the first mounting. In
literature, as at football, strength and agility are insufficient of
themselves; you must have your _side_, or you may run till you are out
of breath, and kick till you are out of shoes, and never win the game.
There must be some to keep others off you, and some to prolong for you
the ball's rebound.... Do not, however, be ambitious of an early fame:
such is apt to shrivel and to drop under the tree." The poetical dictum,
"Whom the gods love, die young," has worked untold mischief, having
created a morbid dislike to a fine physique, on the theory that great
minds are antagonistic to noble bodies. There never was error so fatal:
the larger the brain, the larger should be the reservoir from which to
draw vitality. Were Seneca alive now, he would write no such letter as
he once wrote to Lucilius, protesting against the ridiculous devotion of
his countrymen to physical gymnastics. "To be wise is to be well," was
the gospel he went about preac