The International Monthly Magazine of Literature, Science and Art | Page 6

look more closely at it; try to apply it; and you will find that it is
merely a trick of words. What flashed upon you as a profound
distinction in morals, turns out to be nothing but a verbal antithesis.
What was paraded, as a kind of transcendental analogy between things
not before suspected of resemblance, discovered by the "spiritual
insight" of the moral seer, is in fact no more than a grave clench,--a
solemn quibble,--a conceit; arising not from the perfection of mind, but
the imperfection of language. Those conceptions, fabricated by Fancy
out of the materials that Fancy deals in, and colored by the rays of a

poetic sentiment, wear the same relation to truths, that the prismatic
hues of the spray of a fountain in the sunshine bear to the gems which it
perhaps outshines. It dazzles and delights, but if we try to apprehend it
we become bewildered; and finally discover that we were deceived by a
brilliant phantom of air. You may admire Mr. Tupper; you may enjoy
him; but you cannot understand him: the staple of his sentences is not
stuff of the understanding. Take one of Mr. Tupper's and one of Lord
Bacon's aphorisms; they flash with an equal bravery. But try them upon
the glassy surface of life. Bacon's cut it as if it were air: Tupper's turn
into a little drop of dirty water. One was a diamond, the other but an
icicle: one was the commonest liquor artificially refrigerated; the other
was a crystal in form, but in its substance the pure carbon of truth. If
these bright delusions which Mr. Tupper turns out to the wonder and
praise of his admirers, were really thoughts, is it to be supposed that he
would go on in this way, stringing them together, or evolving one out
of the other, as a spider weaves its unending line, or as a boy blows
soap bubbles from the nose of a tobacco pipe! Fancies, conceits,
intellectual phantoms, may be engendered out of the mind, brooding in
self-creation upon its own suggestions: but truth is to be mined from
Nature, to be wrung from experience, to be seized as the victor's trophy
on the battlefield of action and suffering. The flowers of poetry may
bud spontaneously around the meditative spirit of genius, but the
harvest of Truth, though, to be reaped by mind, must grow out of
Reality.

RICHARD HENRY WILDE AND DANTE.
It appears that our accomplished and lamented countryman, Richard
Henry Wilde, whose "Researches and Considerations concerning the
Love and Imprisonment of Tasso" have been made use of with so
discreditable a freedom by a recent English biographer of that poet,
is--if another pretender prove not less successful--to be deprived also of
the fame he earned by his discoveries in regard to Dante. A
correspondent of The Spectator, under the signature of G. AUBREY
BEZZI, writes as follows:--

"The questions are, what share Mr. Kirkup had in the recovery of the
fresco of Giotto in the chapel of the Palazzo del Podesta at Florence,
and whether directly or indirectly I have been the means of depriving
him, or any of the coöperators in that good work, of the merit due to
their labors. I shall best enable those who take an interest in this matter
to arrive at a fair conclusion, by giving a short history of the recovery
of that beautiful fresco. It was Mr. Wilde, and not Mr. Kirkup, who first
spoke to me of this buried treasure. Mr. Wilde, an American gentleman
respected by all that knew him, was then in Florence, engaged in a
work on Dante and his times, which unfortunately he did not live to
complete. Among the materials he had collected for this purpose, there
were some papers of the antiquarian Moreni, which he was examining
when I called one day, (I had then been three or four months in
Florence,) to read what he had already written, as I was in the habit of
doing from time to time. It was then that a foot-note of Moreni's met
his eye, in which the writer lamented that he had spent two years of his
life in unceasing and unavailing efforts to recover the portrait of Dante,
and the other portions of the fresco of Giotto in the Bargello,
mentioned by Vasari; that others before him had been equally anxious
and equally unsuccessful; and that he hoped that better times would
come, (verranno tempi migliori,) and that the painting, so interesting
both in an artistic and historical point of view, would be again sought
for, and at last recovered. I did not then understand how the efforts of
Moreni and others could have been thus unsuccessful; and I thought
that with common energy and diligence they might have