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By Root 16792 0

from what he saw before him every day, in a beauty nearer to perfection than any work of any Cleomenes in the world. But in the drama, the direct, straightforward, un-German Greek had no Nature so immediately presented from which to make copy. He did what he could — but I do not hesitate to say that that was exceedingly little worth. The profound sense of one or two tragic, or rather, melo-dramatic elements (such as the idea of inexorable Destiny) — this sense gleaming at intervals from out the darkness of the ancient stage, serves, in the very imperfection of its development, to show, not the dramatic ability, but the dramatic in ability of the ancients. In a word, the simple arts spring into perfection at their origin; the complex as inevitably demand the long and painfully progressive experience of ages. To the Greeks, beyond doubt, their drama seemed perfection — it fully answered, to them, the dramatic end, excitement — and this fact is urged as proof of their drama’s perfection in itself. It need only be said, in reply, that their art and their sense of art were, necessarily, on a level.

­ CXXXIII.

That man is not truly brave who is afraid either to seem or to be, when it suits him, a coward.

­ CXXXIV.

A corrupt and impious heart — a merely prurient fancy — a Saturnian brain in which invention has only the phosphorescent glimmer of rottenness. Worthless, body and soul. A foul reproach to the nation that engendered and endures him — a fetid battener upon the garbage of thought — no man — a beast — a pig: Less scrupulous than a carrion-crow, and not very much less filthy than a Wilmer. ­

­ CXXXV.

If ever mortal “wreaked his thoughts upon expression,” it was Shelley. If ever poet sang — as a bird sings — earnestly — impulsively — with utter abandonment — to himself solely — and for the mere joy of his own song — that poet was the author of “The Sensitive Plant.” Of art — beyond that which is instinctive with genius — he either had little or disdained all. He really disdained that Rule which is an emanation from Law, because his own soul was Law in itself. His rhapsodies are but the rough notes — the stenographic memoranda of poems — memoranda which, because they were all-sufficient for his own intelligence, he cared not to be at the trouble of writing out in full for mankind. In all his works we find no conception thoroughly wrought. For this reason he is the most fatiguing of poets. Yet he wearies in saying too little rather than too much. What in him, seems the diffuseness of one idea, is the conglomerate concision of many: and this species of concision it is, which renders him obscure. With such a man, to imitate was out of the question. It would have served no purpose; for he spoke to his own spirit alone, which would have comprehended no alien tongue. Thus he was profoundly original. His quaintness arose from intuitive perception of that truth to which Bacon alone has given distinct utterance: — “There is no exquisite Beauty which has not some strangeness in its proportions.” But whether obscure, original, or quaint, Shelley had no affectations. He was at all times sincere.

From his ruins, there sprang into existence, affronting the heavens, a tottering and fantastic pagoda, in which the salient angels, tipped with mad jangling bells, were the idiosyncratic faults of the original — faults which cannot be considered such in view of his purposes, but which are monstrous when we regard his works as addressed to mankind. A “school” arose — if that absurd term must still be employed — a school — a system of rules — upon the basis of the Shelley who had none. Young men innumerable, dazzled with the glare and bewildered by the bizarrerie of the lightning that flickered through the clouds of “Alastor” had no trouble whatever in heaping up imitative vapors, but, for the lightning, were forced to be content with its spectrum, in which the bizarrerie appeared without the fire. Nor were mature ­minds unimpressed by the contemplation of a greater and more mature; and thus, gradually, into this school of all Lawlessness