"--pp. 125-8.--_Resignation._
"Shall we," he asks, "go hence and find that our vain dreams are not
dead? Shall we follow our vague joys, and the old dead faces, and the
dead hopes?"
He exhorts man to be "_in utrumque paratus_." If the world be the
materialized thought of one all-pure, let him, "by lonely pureness,"
seek his way through the colored dream of life up again to that
all-pure fount:--
"But, if the wild unfathered mass no birth
In divine seats hath known;
In the blank echoing solitude, if earth,
Rocking her obscure body to and fro,
Ceases not from all time to heave and groan,
Unfruitful oft, and, at her happiest throe,
Forms what she forms, alone:"
then man, the only self-conscious being, "seeming sole to awake,"
must, recognizing his brotherhood with this world which stirs at his
feet unknown, confess that he too but seems.
Thus far for the scheme and the creed of the author. Concerning these
we leave the reader to draw his own conclusions.
Before proceeding to a more minute notice of the various poems, we
would observe that a predilection is apparent throughout for
antiquity and classical association; not that strong love which made
Shelley, as it were, the heir of Plato; not that vital grasp of
conception which enabled Keats without, and enables Landor with, the
most intimate knowledge of form and detail, to return to and renew
the old thoughts and beliefs of Greece; still less the mere
superficial acquaintance with names and hackneyed attributes which
was once poetry.
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