gerly and strenuously to all sorts of food for thought,--literary,
philosophical, and political,--that Mr. Mill set himself, among other
things, to study and theorize upon poetry and the arts generally. He
could hardly have failed to know the most recent efflorescence of
English poetry, living as he did in circles where the varied merits of
the new poets were largely and keenly discussed. He had lived also for
some time in France, and was widely read in French poetry. He had
never passed through the ordinary course of Greek and Latin at school
and college, but he had been taught by his father to read these
languages, and had been accustomed from the first to regard their
literature as literature, and to read their poetry as poetry. These
were probably the main elements of his knowledge of poetry. But it
was not his way to dream or otherwise luxuriate over his favorite
poets for pure enjoyment. Mr. Mill was not a cultivator of art for
art's sake. His was too fervid and militant a soul to lose itself in
serene love and culture of the calmly beautiful. He read poetry for
the most part with earnest, critical eye, striving to account for it,
to connect it with the tendencies of the age, or he read to find
sympathy with his own aspirations after heroic energy. He read De
Vigny and other French poets of his generation, with an eye to their
relations to the convulsed and struggling state of France, and because
they were compelled by their surroundings to take life _au serieux_,
and to pursue, with all the resources of their art, something
different from beauty in the abstract. Luxurious passive enjoyment or
torpid half-enjoyment must have been a comparatively rare condition of
his finely-strung, excitable, and fervid system. I believe that his
moral earnestness was too imperious to permit much of this. He was
capable indeed of the most passionate admiration of beauty, but even
that feeling seems to have been interpenetrated by a certain militant
apostolic fervor; his love was as the love of a religious soldier for
a patron saint who extends her aid and countenance to him in his wars.
I do not mean to say that his mind was in a perpetual glow: I mean
only that this surrender to impassioned transports was more
characteristic of the man than serene openness to influx of enjoyment.
His "Thoughts on Poetry and its Varieties," while clear and strenuous
as most of his thoughts were, are neither scientifically precise, nor
do they conta