Kitabı oku: «Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 57, No. 354, April 1845», sayfa 15

North's Specimens of the British Critics
No. III

Dryden

Sir Walter Scott's admirable Life of Dryden concludes with this passage: – "I have thus detailed the life, and offered some remarks on the literary character, of John Dryden; who, educated in a pedantic taste and a fanatical religion, was destined, if not to give laws to the stage of England, at least to defend its liberties; to improve burlesque into satire; to free translation from the fetters of verbal metaphrase, and exclude from it the license of paraphrase; to teach posterity the powerful and varied poetical harmony of which their language was capable; to give an example of the lyric ode of unapproached excellence; and to leave a name second only to those of Milton and of Shakspeare." Two names we miss, and muse where the immortal author of Waverley would have placed them; not surely below Dryden's – those of Chaucer and Spenser.

Let those Four names form a constellation – and the star Dryden, large and bright though it be, must not be looked for in the same region of the heavens. First in the second order of English poets – let glorious John keep the place assigned him by the greatest of Scotsmen. We desire not that he shall vacate the throne. But between the first order and the second, let that be remembered which seems here to have been forgotten, that immeasurable spaces intervene. "Second only to Shakspeare and Milton," implies near approach to them of another greatness inferior but in degree, and Dryden is thus lifted up in our imagination into the sphere of the Creators. On such mention of Milton, let us converse about him for a short half hour, and then venture to descend on Dryden, not with precipitation, but as in a balloon.

To an Englishman recollecting the poetical glories of his country, the Seventeenth Century often appears as the mother of one great name – Milton. Original and mighty poets express, at its highest, the mind of their time as it is localized on their own soil. With Elizabeth the splendour of the feudal and chivalrous ages for England finally sets. A world expires, and erelong a new world rises. The Wars which signalize the new period, contrast deeply with those which heretofore tore the land. Those were the factions of high lineages. Now, thought seizes the weapons of earthly warfare. The rights vesting in an English subject by the statutes of the country – the rights vesting in man, as the subject of civil government, by the laws of God and nature, are scanned by awakened reason, and put arms into men's hands. The highest of all the interests of the human being – higher than all others, as eternity excels time – Religion – is equally debated. The Protestant church is beleaguered by hostile sects – the Reformation subjected to the demand for a more searching and effective reform. Creed, worship, ecclesiastical discipline and government, all come into debate. A thraldom of opinion – a bondage of authority, that held for many centuries the nation bound together in no powerless union, is, upon the sudden, broken up. Men will know why they obey and why they believe; and human laws and divine truths are searched, as far as the wit of man is capable, to the roots. It is the spirit of the new time that has broken forth, and begins ambitiously, and riotously, to try its powers, but nobly, magnanimously, and heroically too. Milton owned and showed himself a son of the time. Gifted with powers eminently fitted for severe investigation – apt for learning, and learned beyond most men – of a temper adverse and rebellious to an assumed and ungrounded control – large-hearted and large-minded to comprehend the diverse interests of men – personally fearless – devout in the highest and boldest sense of the word; namely, as acknowledging no supreme law but from heaven, and as confiding in the immediate communication of divine assistance to the faithful servants of heaven – possessing, moreover, in amplest measure, that peculiar endowment of sovereign poets which enables them to stand up as the teachers of a lofty and tender wisdom, as moral prophets to the species, the clear faculty of profound self-inspection – he was prepared to share in the intellectual strife and change of that day, even had some interposing, pacific angel charmed away from the bosom of the land all other warfare and revolution – and to shine in that age's work, even had the muse never smiled upon his cradled forehead, never laid the magical murmurs of song on his chosen lips. He was a politician, a theologian of his age – amidst the demolition of established things, the clang of arms, and the streaming of blood, whether in the field or upon the scaffold, a thinker and a writer.

There are times that naturally produce real, others that naturally produce imitative poetry. Tranquil, stagnating times, produce the imitative; times that rouse in man self-consciousnesses, produce the real. All great poetry has a moral foundation. It is imagination building upon the great, deep, universal, eternal human will. Therefore profound sympathy with man, and profound intelligence of man, aided by, or growing out of, that profound sympathy, is vital to the true poet. But in stagnating times both sympathy with man sleeps, and the disclosure of man sleeps. Troubled times bring out humanity – show its terrible depths – also its might and grandeur – both ways its truth. A great poet seems to require his birth in an age when there are about him great self-revelations of man, for his vaticination. Moreover, his own particular being is more deeply and strongly stirred and shown to him in such a time. But the moral tempest may be too violent for poetry – as the Civil War of the Roses appeared to blast it and all letters – that of the Parliament contrariwise. The intellect of Milton, in the Paradise Lost, shows that it had seen "the giant-world enraged."

Happily for the literary fame of his country – for the solid exaltation in these latter ages of the sublime art which he cultivated – for the lovers of poetry who by inheritance or by acquisition speak the masculine and expressive language which he still ennobled – for the serene fame of the august poet himself – the political repose which a new change (the restoration of detruded and exiled royalty to its ancestral throne) spread over the land, by shutting up the public hopes of the civil and ecclesiastical republican in despair, and by crushing his faction in the dust, gave him back, in the visionary blindness of undecaying age, to "the still air of delightful studies," in order that, in seclusion from all "barbarous dissonance," he might achieve the work destined to him from the beginning – not less than the greatest ever achieved by man.

Educated by such a strife to power – and not more sublimely gifted than strenuously exercised – Milton had constantly carried in his soul the twofold consciousness of the highest destination. He knew himself born a great poet; and the names of great poets sounding through all time, rang in his ears. What Homer was to his people and to his language, he would be to his; and this was the lower vocation – glorious as earthly things may be glorious – and self-respecting while he thought of his own head as of one that shall be laurel-bound; yet magnanimous and public-spirited, while he trusted to shed upon his language and upon his country the beams of his own fame. This, we say, was his lower vocation, taken among thoughts and feelings high but merely human. But a higher one accompanied it. The sense of a sanctity native to the human soul, and indestructible – the assiduous hallowing of himself, and of all his powers, by religious offices that seek nothing lower than communion with the fountain-head of all holiness and of all good. And Milton, labouring "in the eye of his great taskmaster" – trained by all recluse and silent studies – trained by the turmoil raging around him of the times, and by his own share in the general contention – according to the self-dedication of his mind trained within the temple – he, stricken with darkness, and amidst the gloom of extinguished earthly hopes, assumed the singing robes of the poet.

The purpose of the Paradise Lost is wholly religious. He strikes the loudest, and, at the same time, the sweetest-toned harp of the Muse with the hand of a Christian theologian. He girds up all the highest powers of the human mind to wrestling with the most arduous question with which the human faculties can engage – the all-involving question – How is the world governed? Do we live under chance, or fate, or Providence? Is there a God? And is he holy, loving, wise, and just? He will

 
"Assert eternal providence,
And justify the ways of God to man."
 

The justifying answer he reads in the Scriptures. Man fell, tempted from without by another, but by the act of his own free-will, and by his own choice. Thus, according to the theology of Milton, is the divine Rule of the universe completely justified in the sin into which man has fallen – in the punishment which has fallen upon man. The Justice of God is cleared. And his Love? That shines out, when man has perversely fallen, by the Covenant of Mercy, by finding out for him a Redeemer. And thus the two events in the history of mankind, which the Scriptures present as infinitely surpassing all others in importance, which are cardinal to the destinies of the human race, upon which all our woe, and, in the highest sense, all our weal are hung, become the subject of the work – the Fall of man consoled by the promise and undertaking of his Redemption.

The narrative of the Fall, delivered with an awful and a pathetic simplicity to us in a few words in the first chapter of Genesis, becomes accordingly the groundwork of the Poem; and these few words, with a few more scattered through the Scriptures, and barely hinting Celestial transactions, the War and Fall of the Angels, are by a genius, as daringly as powerfully creative, expanded into the mighty dimensions of an Epic. That unspeakable hope, foreshown to Adam as to be accomplished in distant generations, pouring an exhilarating beam upon the darkness of man's self-wrought destruction, which saves the catastrophe of the poem from utter despair, and which tranquillizes the sadness, has to be interwoven in the poet's narrative of the Fall. How stupendous the art that has disposed and ordered the immensity! – comprehended the complexity of the subject into a clearly harmonized, musically proportionate Whole!

Unless the Paradise Lost had risen from the soul of Milton as a hymn – unless he had begun to sing as a worshipper with his hands uplifted before the altar of incense, the choice of the subject would have been more than bold – it would have been the daring of presumption – an act of impiety. For he will put in dialogue God the Father and God the Son – disclosing their supreme counsels. He has prayed to the Third Person of the Godhead for light and succour. If this were a fetch of human wit, it was in the austere zealot and puritan a mockery. To a devout Roman Catholic poet, we could forgive every thing. For nursed among legends and visual representations of the invisible – panoplied in a childlike imposed faith from the access of impiety – his paternoster and his ave-marie more familiar to his lips than his bread, almost so as their breath – the most audacious representations may come to him vividly and naturally, without a scruple and without a thought. But Milton, the purged, the chastened, a spiritual iconoclast, drinking his faith by his own thirst on the waters of Zion, a champion whose weapons from the armoury of God "are given him tempered" – he to holy things cannot lay other than an awful hand. We know that he believed himself under a peculiar guidance. Surely, he had had visions of glory which, when he designed the poem that would include scenes in heaven, offered themselves again almost like very revelations. If we hesitate in believing this of him, it is because we conceive in him a stern intellectual pride and strength, which could not easily kneel to adore. But there we should greatly err. For he recognized in himself —

 
"Self-knowing, and from thence
Magnanimous to correspond with heaven" —
 

that capacity of song which nothing but sacred Epos could satisfy. Diodati asks him – "Quid studes?" and he answers – "Mehercle, immortalitatem!" This might persuade us that he finally chose the Fall of Man as he at first had chosen King Arthur. But not so. When Arthur dropped away from his purposes, naturally displaced by the after-choice, the will toward an Epic underwent an answerable revolution. The first subject was called by the "longing after immortality." But another longing, or the longing after another immortality, carried the will and the man to the second. The learning and the learned art of the Paradise Lost, concur in inclining us to look upon Milton as an artist rather than a worshipper. On closer consideration of its spirit, we cannot think of his putting his hand to such a work without the inwardly felt conviction that God was with him in it.

And, what is the feeling with which a youthful mind first regards the Paradise Lost? A holy awe – something as if it were a second Bible. So, too, have felt towards it our great poets. Elwood, the Quaker, has told us, but we cannot believe him, that he suggested to Milton the Paradise Regained! Hardly credible that, being the natural sequel and complement of the Paradise Lost, it should not have occurred to Milton. Pray, did the Quaker suggest the treatment? To conceive that man was virtually redeemed when Jesus had avouched, by proof, his perfect obedience, was a view, we think, proper to spring in a religious mind. It is remarkable, however, certainly, that the Atoning Sacrifice, which in the Paradise Lost is brought into the front of the Divine rule and of the poem, in the Paradise Regained hardly appears – if at all. In both you see the holy awe with which Milton shuns describing the scenes of the Passion. Between Adam and Michael, on that "top of speculation" the Visions end at the Deluge. The Crucifixion falls amongst the recorded events, and is told with few and sparing words. You must think that the removal of the dread Crucifixion from the action of the Paradise Regained recommended that action to the poet – contradicting Warburton, who blames him, as a poet, for not having chosen the more stupendous action. Milton thus obtained further a perfect Greek simplicity of plan. The Crucifixion has always seemed profaned when any modern poet has dared to describe it.

The Samson Agonistes was, you know, Milton's last work. How suitable, above all other subjects, to the Hebrew soul within him! Their common blindness – the simplicity of character that is proper to a strong man – "the plain heroic magnitude of mind" – the absolute dependence on God, that is to say, trustful dependence brought out by blindness – the submission under the visiting hand of heaven provoked by Samson's own disobedience – God's especial selection of him as his own, a dedicated Nazarite – his call to be a national deliverer – All these combined to affect his devout imagination; while one might almost think, that in the youthful Milton the same fancy had delighted in the prowess and exploits of Samson which rejoiced in the heroes of chivalrous fable.

What are Dryden's works to these? How shall we compare Poet with Poet – Man with Man?

Let us then turn to the other clauses in Sir Walter's eulogium, and we shall be able to go along with him in much – not all – of what he affirms of his darling Dryden. He was verily A GREAT TRANSLATOR. But before speaking of his performances, or of his principles, in that Fine Art, Translation, let us say a few words on its range and power.

It is indeed most desirable to have the gift of tongues, though the "myriad-minded" man had but that of his own. There are people who can parley all the European languages, even like so many natives, and read you off-hand any strange-looking page, be it even MS., you can submit to their eyes. Yet, we believe, they always most feelingly understand the "old familiar faces" of the words they got by heart in lisping them, and that became a part of their being, not by process of study, but by that seeming inspiration, through which childhood is ever joyfully acquiring multifarious lore in the spirit of love. In waking and sleeping dreams we speak our mother tongue. In it we make love – in it we say our prayers. Had he lived till he was fourscore, John Leyden, in the dotage of genius, would have maundered by the banks of the Ganges in the Doric that charmed his ears among the murmurs of the Teviot. Heaven bless the man who invented Translation! Heaven bless Translators all – especially those who give us in English all thoughts, rich and rare, that took life in foreign attire, and continue to charm human hearts, and souls, and minds, in a change of light that shows them sometimes even more beautiful than when first they had a place among airy creatures!

But methinks we hear some wiseacre, who is no wizard, exclaim: – "Oh! to be enjoyed, it must be read in the original!" What! the Bible? You have no Hebrew, and little Greek, but surely you sometimes dip into the Old and into the New Testament.

To treat the question more argumentatively, let Prose Composition be divided into History, Philosophy, Oratory. In History, Translation – say into English – is easiest, and in all cases practicable. The information transferred is the chief thing asked, even if Style be lost – with some writers a small, with others no doubt a considerable, with a few a great loss. But the facts, that is, the events, and all the characters too, can be turned over, although one finer historical fact – the spirit of the country and time, as breathing in the very Style of the artist, may, yet need not, evaporate. The Translator, however, should be himself an historian or antiquary, and should confine himself – as, indeed, if left to himself he will do – to the nation in whose fate he happens to have had awakened in him – by influences hard to tell, and perhaps to himself unknown – the perpetual interest of a sympathy that endears to him, above all others, that especial region, and the ages that like shadows have passed over it.

In Philosophy, the Translator's task is harder, and it is higher; but its accomplishment is open to the zealous lover of truth. The whole philosophy must be thoroughly possessed by him, or meanings will be lost from, or imposed on, the author – cases fatal both. Besides, of all writers, a philosopher most collects extensive and penetrating theories into chosen words. No dictionary – the soul only of the philosopher interprets these words. In the new language, you must have great power and mastery to seize equivalents if there; if not, to create them, or to extricate yourself with circumlocutions that do not bewilder or mislead – precise and exquisite. Have we, in our language, many, any such Translations? Not Taylor's or Sydenham's Plato – not Gillies's Aristotle. Coleridge is dead – but De Quincey is alive.

In Oratory, the Style is all in all. It is the ipsissimus homo. He who "wielded at will that fierce democratic," does not appear unless the thunder growl and the lightning dazzle. From what hand shall it fulmine over England as over Greece? Yet the matter, the facts, the order, the logic, are all easily enough to be transferred – not the passion and the splendour, except by an orator, and even hardly by him; but Brougham has grappled manfully with Demosthenes, though he hath somewhat diminished the power of the Crown.

But in Poetry. Ay, there the difficulties grow – there all are collected – and one equal to all, or nearly so, is added – Verse! Of all writers, the poet is the most exquisite in his words. His creations revolve in them – live in them – breathe and burn. Shakspeare expresses this – "the poet's pen turns them to shape." Ariel, and Lear, and Hamlet, are not except in the very words – their very own words. For the poet, of all men, feels most susceptibly, sensitively, perceptively, acutely, accurately, clearly, tenderly, kindly – the contact of his mind with yours; and the words are the medium of contact! Yet, most of the Iliad may be transferred – for it is a history. The manners are easily depicted in a Translation – so is the wonderful thinking that remains to us therein from that remote lost world – and makes the substratum of the poem. In short, that old world which Homer preserves, can be shown in a Translation, but not Homer himself. The simplicity, and sweetness, and majesty, and the musical soul and art, require Greek, and old Greek. A translation into Attic Greek by Sophocles, would not be Homer. Into modern English? Alas, and alack-a-day! An English translator might better undertake Euripides than Sophocles, and Sophocles than Æschylus. Æschylus, Pindar, Homer – these are the three terrors of Translation. Why? They are doubly so remote! Distant so far, and distant so high! We should not, ourselves, much care for undertaking Apollonius Rhodius, and Callimachus, although the Alexandrian schoolmaster abounds in the poetical riches of the Greek tongue, and the Cyrenaic hymnist has an unattainable spirit of grace and elastic step. Yet we could, with a safe conscience, try; because if less glory be attempted by the translator, less can be lost for his original. Whereas, if we let down Homer, Pindar, Æschylus, we are lowering the heights of the human spirit —crimen læsœ majestatis. In poetry the absolutely creative power of the human spirit – that immense endowment and privilege of the human being – is at its height. Many view this endowment and privilege with scepticism – renouncing their own glory – denying themselves. Therefore, it is always important, in civilized times, that the majesty and might of poetry be sustained – surrounded by a body-guard of opinion. In rude times it can take good care of itself. Then the king walks among the people safe in their faith and love. Now you tremble to diminish the reverence of that creation. But courage! All cannot read Greek, and they are, as fellow men of Homer, entitled to as much of him as they can get. Chapman, Pope, Cowper, Sotheby, all taken together, impress an Englishman (Scotsman included) who is no Grecian, with a belief in greatness. And then for the perpetual feeding of his faith he has his own Chaucer, Spenser, Shakspeare, Milton.

Translation, you see then, O gracious perusers! has divers motives. One is ambitious. It is to help in giving the poet his due fame, and that is a motive honourably sprung, since it comes of the belief that the poet belongs to the species at large; and that accordingly his praise has not had its full reverberation, until it has rebounded from all hearts. Of the same impulse, but dealing justice in another direction, is the wish that the less learned shall not, from that accident, forfeit their share of the common patrimony; and that surely is among the best of all reasons. A peculiar sort of zeal is to cultivate the vernacular literature by transplanting the great works of other more happily cultivated languages, as we naturalize fair and useful exotics. This is an early thought, and goes off as the country advances. Probably the different reasons of Translation would affect, even materially, the characters of Translation; or at least, if they coexist, the predominance of one over the other moving causes. The different purposes will even give different orders of Translators. To undertake to aid in diffusing the version of Homer to the ends of the West, would ask an Englishman tolerably confident in his own powers. It breathed in the fiery spirit of George Chapman, who having rolled out the Iliad in our stateliest numbers, the Odyssey in more moderate strain, and finally dispatched the Homeric Minora, begins his own Epilogue of three consecutive labours, with

"The work that I WAS BORN TO DO IS DONE!"

A little reflection will suggest to many a wishing Translator, that HE is in danger of rather doing injustice to the celebrity of an admired original. Incapables! refrain, desist, be dumb.

The use of Translations to the literature that has received them has been questioned. The native genius and energies of a country may, it has been feared, be oppressed by the importation of wealth and luxuries. The Hygeian maxim to remain poor for the sake of health and strength, is hard to act upon. In another sense, we might rather look upon the introduced strangers as dangerous rivals, who rouse us to woo with better devotion, and so are useful. Besides, it looks like a timid policy to refuse to know what our fellows have done. Milton was not subdued, but inflamed, by conversing with all the great originals. Burns did not the less Dorically tune his reed, because Pope had sounded in his ear echoes of the Scamandrian trumpet-blast. The truer and more encouraging doctrine rather seems to be, that if the land has in its mould the right nurture of genius, genius will strike its roots, and lift its flowers. In the mean time, it is to be considered, against such a policy of jealous protection, that not the influence on the vernacular literature is the first legitimate claim, but the gain of enlightenment for the human mind, intent upon enlarging itself by bringing under ken every where that which itself has been, and that which itself has done every where.

The great distinction which we have observed in these remarks on Translation, between compositions in Prose and Verse, seems here to demand from us some remarks. A question of the very highest importance in literature arises – can the Fictitious which the poet relates in Verse be as well related in Prose? The voice of all ages, countries, languages, answers – NO! The literature of every civilized nation presents this phenomenon – a division broad and deep, running through it, and marked by that distinction in the musical structure of discourse, which we habitually designate by the names, Prose and Verse. The distinction, as we all know, is as decided in the substance itself of the composition, as it is in the musical putting together of the words. Homer, Pindar, Alcæus, Æschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Aristophanes, or Lucretius, Virgil, Horace, Ovid, upon the one side; and upon the other, Herodotus and Thucydides, Demosthenes, Plato, and the Stagyrite – or under another still fortunate sky, Livy, Cæsar, Tacitus, Cicero and Seneca – here bare names of the poets on the one side, of the writers of prose on the other, express alike to our soberest judgment, and to our most awakened enthusiasm, nothing less than two distinct Worlds of Thinking.

How so commanding, so permeating, so vivifying, and so transfusing a power should reside in a fact of human speech, seemingly so slight and slender as that ruled and mechanical adjustment of a few syllables which we call a verse, is perhaps not explicable by our philosophy; but of the power itself, the uniform history of mankind leaves us no liberty to doubt. Yet may we understand something of this wonderful agency; and conceive how the new and strange wealth of music brought out from words, of which the speaker in verse finds himself the privileged master, may lift up, as on wings, his courage to think and utter. We may suppose that the sweet and melting, or the solemn, the prolonged, the proud swell, or flow, or fall of his own numbers, may surprise his own ear, and seize his own soul with unexpected emotions; and that off his guard and unawares, and, as grave ancient writers have said, in a sort of sacred madness, he may be hurried into inventions of greatness, of wonder, and beauty, which would have remained for ever locked up and forbidden to the colder and more reserved temper, which seems fittingly to accompany prose, the accustomed language of Reason. Versification is Measure, and it is Harmony. If you hear the measure you listen expectantly, and there is a recurring pleasure in the fulfilment of that expectation. But the pleasure thus afforded would soon be exhausted, did not the power of Harmony tell. That is a musical pleasure which cannot be exhausted. Here, then, is a reason why the natural music of speech shall be elaborated to its height in verse. You assume that the mind of the orator, the historian, the philosopher, is given up wholly to the truth of his matter. Therefore in him the palpable study of harmonious periods (as in Isocrates) impairs your confidence in his earnestness and sincerity. Not so, we venture to say, in the case of the poet. In his composition the very law of the verse instals the sound in a sort of mysterious sovereignty over the sense. He hurries or he protracts – he swells notes as of an organ, he attenuates them as of a flute. He seeks in the sound of words their power – and their power is great – to paint notions and things – to imitate the twanging of a bow, the hissing of an arrow, the roaring of the winds, the weltering of the waves. His verse laughs with merriment, and wails with sorrow; and that, which would in a grave writer of prose be frivolous, be sonorous trifles, crowns his muse with praise. Consequences follow, deeply penetrating into the substance of the whole composition, which is thus delivered up, in a manner unknown to prose, to the wonder-working power of a delighted inspiration.

We know if any one begins to recite a passage of Milton, that we expect to hear a charm of sound which we never for a moment dream of hearing in prose – a new and a more beautiful speech. For having made one mode of speech more musical than another, we have placed it more immediately under the dominion of the faculty by which we are cognizant of beauty. Accordingly we feel, and know, and universally admit, although Eloquence is musical, that Poetry far excels Eloquence in its alliance with the beautiful. Music is beauty, addressing itself to the sense of hearing, and therefore the beautiful is showered upon poetry, and therein everlastingly enshrined. Verse, then, is a language seized upon by the soul gratifying itself in the indulgence of its own emotions, under a law of beauty. Thus we have seen a power introduced into human discourse, by a cause that hardly promised such wonderful effects. A modulation of sounds, a musical rising, and falling, and flowing, fitted for expressing a fervour, a boldness, an enthusiasm in the thinking, suddenly transforms the whole character of composition, creates or infuses a new spirit of thought. A kind of literature is produced, of a peculiar, and that the highest order – Poetry. We have seen this take many beautiful, august, and imposing forms – the majesty of the Epopeia – the pathetic energy of the Tragic Drama – the rapturous exaltation and prodigal splendour of the Lyrical Ode. The names of the species recal the names of the great works belonging to each, and of the great masters whose memory the works have made immortal. Those masters of the divine art thus breathing delight, are numbered among the loftiest and most powerful spirits. Nations, illustrious in peace and war, heroic in character and action, founders of stable and flourishing republics and empires, have set on the front of their renown the fame of having produced this or that other glorious poem. What wonder, since the poet, in forms given by imagination, embodies the profoundest, the loftiest, the tenderest, the innermost acts and movements of that soul which lives in every human bosom? What wonder if each of us loves the poet, when in his work, as in a celestial mirror, each of us beholds himself naturally and truly pictured, and yet ennobled? What wonder if the nation, proud of itself, of its position, and of its memories, exalts its own darling son of song, who may have fixed, in a precious throng of imperishable words, the peculiar spirit of thinking, of loving, of daring, which has made the nation what it has been, is, and hopes long to be? What wonder if humankind, when mighty ages have departed, and languages once cultivated in their beauty, have ceased from being spoken, should bring across lands and seas crowns of undying laurels to cast at the feet of some awful poet who cannot die? In whose true, capacious, and prophetic mind, the coming civilization of his own people was long beforehand anticipated and predisposed? And in whose antique verse we, the offspring of other ages, and tongues, and races, drink still the freshly-flowing and ever-living waters of original and unexhausted humanity?