And
in tradition is it otherwise?--Every man tells the tale in his own
way; and the merits of the story itself, or the person who tells it,
or his way of telling, procures it a lodgment in the mind of the
hearer, whence it is ever ready to start up and claim kindred with
some external excitement.
Thus it is the luck of all things of the past to come down to us with
some poetry about them; while from those of diurnal experience we
must extract this poetry ourselves: and although all good men are,
more or less, poets, they are passive or recipient poets; while the
active or donative poet caters for them what they fail to collect.
For let a poet walk through London, and he shall see a succession of
incidents, suggesting some moral beauty by a contrast of times with
times, unfolding some principle of nature, developing some attribute
of man, or pointing to some glory in The Maker: while the man who
walked behind him saw nothing but shops and pavement, and coats and
faces; neither did he hear the aggregated turmoil of a city of
nations, nor the noisy exponents of various desires, appetites and
pursuits: each pulsing tremour of the atmosphere was not struck into
it by a subtile ineffable something willed forcibly out of a cranium:
neither did he see the driver of horses holding a rod of light in his
eye and feeling his way, in a world he was rushing through, by the
motion of the end of that rod:--he only saw the wheels in motion, and
heard the rattle on the stones; and yet this man stopped twice at a
book shop to buy 'a Tennyson,' or a 'Browning's Sordello.
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