Nowhere, either in his voluptuousness or in its counterpart of disgust, is there moderation.

The Hellenic precept, 'Nothing overmuch,' the gracious Greek virtue of temperate restraint, which is for art what training is for athletes, discipline for soldiers, and pruning for orchard trees, has been violated in every canto, each phrase, the slightest motive of this poem.

Sensuality can bear such violation better than sublimity; therefore the perfume of voluptuousness in the _Adone_, though excessive, is both penetrating and profound; while those passages which aim at inspiring terror or dilating the imagination, fail totally of their effect.

The ghastly, grotesque, repulsive images are so overcharged that they cease even to offend.

We find ourselves in a region where tact, sense of proportion, moral judgment, and right adjustment of means to ends, have been wantonly abandoned.