Page:Biographical and critical studies by James Thomson ("B.V.").djvu/484

 468 CRITICAL STUDIRS " The Book ! I turn its medicinable leaves In London now till, as in Florence erst, A spirit laughs and leaps through every limb, And lights my eye, and lifts me by the hair. Letting me have my will again with these — How title I the dead alive once more?" And yet, when he has nearly finished the labour which he begins with such buoyant consciousness of strength : — Of glory and of good," when, in his own words, the Ring is all but round and done — he can address the book as "my four- years' intimate." This immense work, charged and surcharged with learning, knowledge, ever-active subtle intellect, ever-vital passion, whether of sympathy or antipathy, ever-realising imagination, all thought out and wrought out in only four years ! — the fact appears almost incredible to one whose mind moves at about the common sluggish rate. This poem, which, when I first studied it, grew beyond me and above me more and more with the profoundly impressive suggestion, still overawing, of a vast Gothic cathe- dral no single generation could accomplish ; which, at the most grudging estimate, is an achievement whereon, "itself by itself solely," even a mighty artist could be content to challenge the ages, secure of a noble fame ; this, I found on nearing the end, had been all reared in such a small section of the architect's life. The unpromising seed of an old yellow eightpenny book chanced to fall into the right rich soil, into the one mind and heart in the
 * ' Swift as a spirit hastening to his task