Page:The lay of the Nibelungs; (IA nibelungslay00hortrich).pdf/34

xxx Poem. Considering farther what intellectual environment we now find it in, it is doubly to be prized and wondered at; for it differs from those “Hero-books,” as molten or carved metal does from rude agglomerated ore; almost as some Shakespeare from his fellow Dramatists, whose “Tamburlaines” and “Island Princesses,” themselves not destitute of merit, first show us clearly in what pure loftiness and loneliness the “Hamlets” and “Tempests” reign.

The unknown Singer of the “Nibelungen,” though no Shakespeare, must have had a deep poetic soul; wherein things discontinuous and inanimate shaped themselves together into life, and the Universe with its wondrous purport stood significantly imaged; overarching, as with heavenly firmaments and eternal harmonies, the little scene where men strut and fret their hour. His Poem, unlike so many old and new pretenders to that name, has a basis and organic structure, a beginning, middle and end; there is one great principle and idea set forth in it, round which all its multifarious parts combine in living union. Remarkable it is, moreover, how along with this essence and primary condition of all poetic virtue, the minor external virtues of what we call Taste and so forth, are, as it were, presupposed; and the living soul of Poetry being there, its body of incidents, its garment of language, come of their own accord. So toa in the case of Shakespeare: his feeling of propriety, as compared with that of the Marlowes and Fletchers, his quick sure sense of what is fit and unfit, either in act or word, might astonish us, had he no other superiority. But true Inspiration, as it may well do, includes that same Taste, or rather a far higher and heartfelt Taste, of which that other “elegant” species is but an ineffcetual, irrational apery: let us see the herald Mercury actually descend from his Heaven, and the bright wings, and the graceful movement of these, will not be wanting.

With an instinctive art, far different from acquired artifice, this Poet of the “Nibelungen,” working in the same province with his contemporaries of the “Heldenbuch,” on the same material