Page:Biographical and critical studies by James Thomson ("B.V.").djvu/350

 334 CRITICAL STUDIES most spontaneous and inspired of modern poets, wrote the "Witch of Atlas," 624 lines in the not facile ottava rima, in three days ; but that was only about as much in a day as Dr. Wilkinson (/. /. the Spirit) wrote in an hour. Shelley, interested by the vnprovvisatore Sgricci, tried improvisation himself, dictating the blank verse fragment ** Orpheus " to Mrs. Shelley, as we learn from a note of hers on the MS. But however spontaneously Shelley conceived, and however rapidly he wrote the first draught, he, in common with the greatest and most enduring poets (with perhaps the exception of Shakespeare, of whom the players boasted that he never blotted a line ; stout Ben Jonson retorting, surely with excellent judg- ment, " I wish he had blotted a thousand "), carefully revised and corrected, afterwards.* The Will and Reason and Imagination were held in abeyance, passive to the Divine influx ; the writing was attended by no fervour, no feeling beyond curiosity as to the result of the experiment. Poetry, inspiration, without fervour or feeling, is what I can no more conceive than music without vibration of the instrument and the surrounding air. Why, Sweden- the lovely lines, " To a Lady, with a Guitar" : " It was a frightful scrawl : words smeared out with his finger, and one upon the other, over and over in tiers, and all run together, ' in most admired dis- order.' It might have been taken for a sketch of a marsh overgrown with bulrushes, and the blots for wild ducks, such a dashed-off daub as self-conceited artists mistake for a manifestation of genius. On my observing this to him, he answered : ' When my brain gets heated with thought, it soon boils, and throws off images and words faster than I can skim them off. In the morning, when cooled down, out of the rough sketch (as you justly call it) I shall attempt a drawing.'"
 * Trelawny, in his " Recollections," tells us of the first draught of