outh to his death? Duerer,
the precise, the perfect, able to say, "It cannot be better done," yet
re-engraving a portion of his best-known plate, and frankly leaving the
rejected portion half erased?[6] Titian, whose custom it was to lay
aside his pictures for long periods and then criticise them, imagining
that he was looking at them "with the eyes of his worst enemy"?

There is not, I suppose, in the English language a more "perfect" poem
than "Lycidas." It purports to have been written in a single day, and
its wholeness and unity and crystalline completeness give good colour to
the thought that it probably was so.

"Thus sang the uncouth swain to the oaks and rills,
While the still morn went out with sandals gray;
He touched the tender stops of various quills,
With eager thought warbling his Doric lay:
And now the sun had stretched out all the hills,
And now was dropt into the western bay:
At last he rose, and twitched his mantle blue;
To-morrow, to fresh woods and pastures new."

Yet, regarding it, the delightful Charles Lamb writes:[7]--

"I had thought of the _Lycidas_ as of a full-grown beauty,--as springing
with all its parts absolute,--till, in evil hour, I was shown the
original copy of it, together with the other minor poems of its author,
in the library of Trinity, kept like something to be proud of. I wish
they had thrown them in the Cam, or sent them, after the later cantos of
Spenser, into the Irish Channel. How it staggered me to see the fine
things in their ore!--interlined, corrected, as if their words were
mortal, alterable, displaceable at pleasure; as if they might have been
otherwise, and just as good; as if inspiration were made up of parts,
and those fluctuating, successive, indifferent! I will never go into the
workshop of any great artist again, nor desire a sight of his picture,
till it is fairly off the easel; no, not if Raphael were to be alive
again, and painting another Galatea."

But the real truth of the case is that whatever "inspiration" may be,
and whether or not "made up of parts," it, or man's spirit and will in
all works of art, has to _deal with_ things so made up; and not only so,
but also as described by the other words here chosen: _fluctuating_,
_successive_, and _indifferent_. You have to deal with the whole sum of
things all at once; the possible material crowds around the artist's
will, shifting, changing, presenting at al