harp for his ear, in which suffering lies naked, and we can
almost feel the flesh palpitate, and hear the bones crack and crash
under the rude embrace of sorrow. All savage wildness was repulsive
to him. In music, in literature, in the conduct of life, all that
approached the melodramatic was painful to him The frantic and
despairing aspects of exaggerated romanticism were repellent to him,
he could not endure the struggling for wonderful effects, for delicious
excesses. "He loved Shakspeare only under many conditions. He thought
his characters were drawn too closely to the life, and spoke a language
too true; he preferred the epic and lyric syntheses which leave the poor
details of humanity in the shade. For the same reason he spoke little
and listened less, not wishing to give expression to his own thoughts,
or to receive the thoughts of others, until after they had attained a
certain degree of elevation."

A nature so completely master of itself, so full of delicate reserve,
which loved to divine through glimpses, presentiments, suppositions, all
that had been left untold (a species of divination always dear to poets
who can so eloquently finish the interrupted words) must have felt
annoyed, almost scandalized, by an audacity which leaves nothing
unexpressed, nothing to be divined. If he had been called upon to
express his own views upon this subject, we believe he would have
confessed that in accordance with his taste, he was only permitted
to give vent to his feelings on condition of suffering much to remain
unrevealed, or only to be divined under the rich veils of broidery in
which he wound his emotions. If that which they agree in calling classic
in art appeared to him too full of methodical restrictions, if he
refused to permit himself to be garroted in the manacles and frozen
in the conventions of systems, if he did not like confinement although
enclosed in the safe symmetry of a gilded cage, it was not because he
preferred the license of disorder, the confusion of irregularity. It
was rather that he might soar like the lark into the deep blue of the
unclouded heavens. Like the Bird of Paradise, which it was once thought
never slept but while resting upon extended wing, rocked only by the
breath of unlimited space at the sublime height at which it reposed; he
obstinately refused to descend to bury himself in the misty gloom of
the forests, or to surround himself with the howlings and wailings
with which it is f