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 of their Utopia, and the crowds who were to people the unbuilded city of their dreams Went straying after the feathered chiefs of the rebels, who, when the fulness of time was come, themselves received apotheosis and the honours of a new motley pantheon. The tomb of that great vision bears for epitaph the ironical inscription which defines a Classic poet as "a dead Romantic."

In truth the Romantics are right, and the serenity of the classic ideal is the serenity of paralysis and death. A universal agreement in the use of words facilitates communication but, so inextricably is expression entangled with feeling, it leaves nothing to communicate. Inanity dogs the footsteps of the classic tradition, which is every where lackeyed, through a long decline, by the pallor of reflected glories. Even the irresistable novelty of personal experience is dulled by being cast in the old matrix, and the man who professes to find the whole of himself in the Bible or in Shakespeare (or in the Mahabharata) had as good not be. He is a replica and a shadow, a foolish libel on his Creator, who from the beginning, was never guilty of tautology. This is the error of the classical creed, to imagine that in a fleeting world, where the quickest eye can never see the some thing twice, and a deed once done can never be repeated language alone should be capable of fixity and finality. Nature avenges herself on those who would thus make her