when the heart of Shelley was laid in the cemetery of Caius Cestius!  Beauty, music, sweetness, tears—­the mouth of the worm has fed of them all.  Into that sacred bridal-gloom of death where he holds his nuptials with eternity let not our rash speculations follow him.  Let us hope rather that as, amidst material nature, where our dull eyes see only ruin, the finer eye of science has discovered life in putridity and vigour in decay,—­seeing dissolution even and disintegration, which in the mouth of man symbolise disorder, to be in the works of God undeviating order, and the manner of our corruption to be no less wonderful than the manner of our health,—­so, amidst the supernatural universe, some tender undreamed surprise of life in doom awaited that wild nature, which, worn by warfare with itself, its Maker, and all the world, now

   Sleeps, and never palates more the dug,
   The beggar’s nurse, and Caesar’s.

FOOTNOTES

{1} That is to say, taken as the general animating spirit of the Fine Arts.

{2} The Abbe Bareille was not, of course, responsible for Savonarola’s taste, only for thus endorsing it.

{3} We mean, of course, the hymn, “I rise from dreams of time.”

{4} We are a little surprised at the fact, because so many Victorian poets are, or have been, prose-writers as well.  Now, according to our theory, the practice of prose should maintain fresh and comprehensive a poet’s diction, should save him from falling into the hands of an exclusive coterie of poetic words.  It should react upon his metrical vocabulary to its beneficial expansion, by taking him outside his aristocratic circle of language, and keeping him in touch with the great commonalty, the proletariat of speech.  For it is with words as with men:  constant intermarriage within the limits of a patrician clan begets effete refinement; and to reinvigorate the stock, its veins must be replenished from hardy plebeian blood.

{5} Wordsworth’s adaptation of it, however, is true.  Men are not “children of a larger growth,” but the child is father of the man, since the parent is only partially reproduced in his offspring.

{6} The Rhythm of Life, by Alice Meynell.

{7} “And the stars of heaven fell unto the earth, even as a fig-tree casteth her untimely figs, when she is shaken of a mighty wind” (Rev. vi, 13).

{8} Such analogies between master in sister-arts are often interesting.  In some respects, is not Brahms the Browning of music?

{9} Seek first, not seek only.

{10} We hope that we need not refer the reader, for the methods of magic architecture, to Ariosto and that Atlas among enchanters, Beckford.