Biographia Literaria | Page 9

alike the ague.
But where the ideas are vivid, and there exists an endless power of
combining and modifying them, the feelings and affections blend more
easily and intimately with these ideal creations than with the objects of
the senses; the mind is affected by thoughts, rather than by things; and
only then feels the requisite interest even for the most important events
and accidents, when by means of meditation they have passed into
thoughts. The sanity of the mind is between superstition with
fanaticism on the one hand, and enthusiasm with indifference and a
diseased slowness to action on the other. For the conceptions of the
mind may be so vivid and adequate, as to preclude that impulse to the
realizing of them, which is strongest and most restless in those, who
possess more than mere talent, (or the faculty of appropriating and
applying the knowledge of others,)--yet still want something of the
creative and self-sufficing power of absolute genius. For this reason
therefore, they are men of commanding genius. While the former rest
content between thought and reality, as it were in an intermundium of
which their own living spirit supplies the substance, and their
imagination the ever-varying form; the latter must impress their
preconceptions on the world without, in order to present them back to
their own view with the satisfying degree of clearness, distinctness, and
individuality. These in tranquil times are formed to exhibit a perfect
poem in palace, or temple, or landscape-garden; or a tale of romance in
canals that join sea with sea, or in walls of rock, which, shouldering
back the billows, imitate the power, and supply the benevolence of
nature to sheltered navies; or in aqueducts that, arching the wide vale
from mountain to mountain, give a Palmyra to the desert. But alas! in
times of tumult they are the men destined to come forth as the shaping
spirit of ruin, to destroy the wisdom of ages in order to substitute the
fancies of a day, and to change kings and kingdoms, as the wind shifts
and shapes the clouds [8]. The records of biography seem to confirm
this theory. The men of the greatest genius, as far as we can judge from
their own works or from the accounts of their contemporaries, appear to
have been of calm and tranquil temper in all that related to themselves.
In the inward assurance of permanent fame, they seem to have been

either indifferent or resigned with regard to immediate reputation.
Through all the works of Chaucer there reigns a cheerfulness, a manly
hilarity which makes it almost impossible to doubt a correspondent
habit of feeling in the author himself. Shakespeare's evenness and
sweetness of temper were almost proverbial in his own age. That this
did not arise from ignorance of his own comparative greatness, we have
abundant proof in his Sonnets, which could scarcely have been known
to Pope [9], when he asserted, that our great bard--
------grew immortal in his own despite. (Epist. to Augustus.)
Speaking of one whom he had celebrated, and contrasting the duration
of his works with that of his personal existence, Shakespeare adds:
Your name from hence immortal life shall have, Tho' I once gone to all
the world must die; The earth can yield me but a common grave, When
you entombed in men's eyes shall lie. Your monument shall be my
gentle verse, Which eyes not yet created shall o'er-read; And tongues to
be your being shall rehearse, When all the breathers of this world are
dead: You still shall live, such virtue hath my pen, Where breath most
breathes, e'en in the mouth of men. SONNET LXXXI.
I have taken the first that occurred; but Shakespeare's readiness to
praise his rivals, ore pleno, and the confidence of his own equality with
those whom he deemed most worthy of his praise, are alike manifested
in another Sonnet.
Was it the proud full sail of his great verse, Bound for the praise of
all-too-precious you, That did my ripe thoughts in my brain inhearse,
Making their tomb, the womb wherein they grew? Was it his spirit, by
spirits taught to write Above a mortal pitch that struck me dead? No,
neither he, nor his compeers by night Giving him aid, my verse
astonished. He, nor that affable familiar ghost, Which nightly gulls him
with intelligence, As victors of my silence cannot boast; I was not sick
of any fear from thence! But when your countenance fill'd up his line,
Then lack'd I matter, that enfeebled mine. S. LXXXVI.
In Spenser, indeed, we trace a mind constitutionally tender, delicate,

and, in comparison with his three great compeers, I had almost said,
effeminate; and this additionally saddened by the unjust persecution of
Burleigh, and the severe calamities, which overwhelmed his latter