Page:George Chapman, a critical essay (IA georgechapmancri00swin).pdf/24

 as tough and tedious a task for the mind as oakum-picking or stone-breaking can be for the body. Worse than all this is the want of any perceptible centre towards which these tangled and ravelled lines of thought may seem at least to converge. We see that the author has thought hard and felt deeply; we apprehend that he is charged as it were to the muzzle with some ardent matter of spiritual interest, of which he would fain deliver himself in explosive eloquence; we perceive that he is angry, ambitious, vehement and arrogant; no pretender, but a genuine seer or Pythian bemused and stifled by the oracular fumes which choke in its very utterance the message they inspire, and for ever preclude the seer from becoming properly the prophet of their mysteries:

We understand a fury in his words, But not the words;"

and the fury which alone we understand waxes tenfold hotter at our incompetence to comprehend what the orator is incompetent to express. He foams at the mouth with rage through all the flints