But what is the fate of a poet
who owns the quarry, but cannot build the poem? Ere the century is out he
will be nine parts dead, and immortal only in that tenth part of him
which is included in a thin volume of "beauties." Already Moxon has felt
the need of extracting this essential oil of him; and his memory will be
kept alive, if at all, by the precious material rather than the
workmanship of the vase that contains his heart. And what shall we
forebode of so many modern poems, full of splendid passages, beginning
everywhere and leading nowhere, reminding us of nothing so much as the
amateur architect who planned his own house, and forgot the staircase
that should connect one floor with another, putting it as an afterthought
on the outside?
Lichtenberg says somewhere, that it was the advantage of the ancients to
write before the great art of writing ill had been invented; and
Shakespeare may be said to have had the good luck of coming after Spenser
(to whom the debt of English poetry is incalculable) had reinvented the
art of writing well. But Shakespeare arrived at a mastery in this respect
which sets him above all other poets. He is not only superior in degree,
but he is also different in kind. In that less purely artistic sphere of
style which concerns the matter rather than the form his charm is often
unspeakable.
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