Page:Papers on Literature and Art (Fuller).djvu/97

Rh and in paradisaical quiet listen to the tales of other days. No! dissatisfied and represt, they want to be made to weep, because, in so doing, they feel themselves in some sense free.

All this conflict and apparently bootless fretting and wailing mark a transition-state—a state of gradual revolution, in which men try all things, seeking what they hold fast, and feel that it is good. But there are some, the pilot-minds of the age, who cannot submit to pass all their lives in experimentalizing. They cannot consent to drift across the waves in the hope of finding somewhere a haven and a home; but, seeing the blue sky over them, and believing that God’s love is every where, try to make the best of that spot on which they have been placed, and, not unfrequently, by the aid of spiritual assistance, more benign than that of Faust’s Lemures, win from the raging billows large territories, whose sands they can convert into Eden bowers, tenanted by lovely and majestic shapes.

Such are Southey, Coleridge, and Wordsworth. They could not be satisfied, like Byron, with embodying the peculiar wit or peculiar sufferings of the times; nor like Scott, with depicting an era which has said its say and produced its fruit: nor like Campbell, with occasionally giving a voice and a permanent being to some brilliant moment or fair scene. Not of nobler nature, not more richly endowed than Shelley, they were not doomed to misguided efforts and baffled strivings; much less could they, like Moore, consider poetry merely as the harmonious expression of transient sensations. To them Poetry was, must be, the expression of what is eternal in man’s nature, through illustrations drawn from his temporal state; a representation in letters of fire, on life’s dark curtain, of that which lies beyond; philosophy dressed in the robes of Taste and Imagination; the voice of Nature and of God, humanized by being echoed back from the understanding hearts of Priests and Seers! Of course this could not be the popular poetry of the day. Being eminently the pro-