ok of a line of poetry
again! Most of them, it seems, _can_ hardly bear that shock; and be
it far from me to blame them. I should surmise that the mere names
of Wordsworth, Byron, Shelley, etc., would fall upon their ears with
a dreariness of memory like the tolling of chapel-bells.

They are queer birds, too, these writers of commentaries upon
literature.

At one time in my life I myself absorbed such "critical literature"
with a morbid avidity, as if it had been a drug; and a drug it is--a
drug dulling one to all fine and fresh sensations--a drug from the
effects of which I am only now, at this late hour, beginning slowly
to recover. They set one upon a completely wrong track, bringing
forward what is unessential and throwing what is essential into
thebackground. Dear heavens! how well I recall those grey
discriminations. Wordsworth was the fellow who hit upon the idea
of the _anima mundi._ Shelley's "philosophy of life" differed from
Wordsworth's in that _his_ universal spirit was a thing of pure Love,
whereas the other's was a matter of pure Thought.

Pure Love! Pure Thought! Was there ever such petrifying of the
evasive flame? "Words! Words! Words!" I suspect that the book the
sweet Prince was reading when he met Polonius in the passage was
a book of essays on the poets.

The worst of this historical-comical-philosophical way of going to
work is that it leaves one with the feeling that poetry is a sort of
intellectual game, entirely removed from the jostling pressure of
actual life, and that poets when once dead are shoved into their
academic pigeon-holes to be labelled like things under glass cases.
The person who can rattle off such descriptive labels the quickest is
the person of culture. Thus history swallows up poetry; thus the
"comparative method" swallows up history; and the whole business
is snatched away from the magical flow of real life and turned into
the dreariness of a mausoleum. How refreshing, how salutary, to
turn from all thoughts as to what Byron's "place in literature" was to
such thrilling poetry as

"She walks in beauty like the night
Of cloudless climes and starry skies,
And all that's best of dark and bright
Meet in her aspect and her eyes--"

or to such sonorous lines full of the reverberating echoes of pent-up
passion as those which begin

"There is none of Beauty's daughters."

One has only to recall the way these simple careless outbursts have
burned