Page:Biographical and critical studies by James Thomson ("B.V.").djvu/386

 370 CRITICAL STUDIES patching away, year after year, for a whole generation all the shreds and tatters of Hebrew old clo's, in the desperate delusion of thus making a sufficient and everlasting garment for the illimitable Universe of Life. And, moreover, can we help being angry, do we not well to be angry when, our poor race pining for illumination, some of the most fulgent spirits obstinately refuse to be effulgent ; will not let their light shine forth before men, but carefully hide it under a bushel ? The supreme warmth and light of genius and intellect are so rare, so sorely needed, yet so unaccountably wasted ! I mean not in such instances as those of Swedenborg and Comte, where the long chronic monomania of the decadence followed an acute attack of mental disease in the prime ; I think of a Maurice scourging himself with those "forty stripes save one," the Thirty -nine Articles, and burying his genius in the deathly vaults of the mouldering English Church ; of a Newman dis- membering himself of intellect and will, and perishing in the labyrinths of the Roman Catacombs ; of a Wilkinson immolating his splendid powers on the altar built of dead men's bones, of a demented dogma- tism more implacable than the old heathen altars of merely bodily human sacrifice. When I first read in the great preface to the "Human Body" (185 1), that he hoped never again to come forth with the pen, a mournful verse from a place of most mournful frustrate life arose in my memory, and recurs now as I ponder these lives, so frustrate of their full develop- ment and happiness in usefulness, a verse of Matthew Arnold's stanzas from that sepulchre of Death-in-life, the Grande Chartreuse : —