And yet, dim and faint as is the sound of it, we still prefer this dreamy patience, the soft submissive endurance of the Breton lady, and the human passions and sorrows of the Knight and the Queen, to the high, and shall we say, pseudo Greek inflation of the philosopher musing above the crater, and the boy Callicles singing myths upon the mountain.
Does the reader require morals and meanings to these stories? What shall they be, then?—the deceitfulness of knowledge and the illusiveness of the affections, the hardness and roughness and contrariousness of the world, the difficulty of living at all, the impossibility of doing anything—voilà tout? A charitable and patient reader, we believe (such as is the present reviewer), will find in the minor poems that accompany these pieces, intimations—what more can reader or reviewer ask?—of some better and further thing than these; some approximations to a kind of confidence; some incipiences of a degree of hope; some roots, retaining some vitality, of conviction and moral purpose:—
And though we wear out life, alas,
Distracted as a homeless wind,
In beating where we must not pass,
And seeking what we shall not find,
Yet shall we one day gain, life past,
Clear prospect o’er our being’s whole,
Shall see ourselves, and learn at last
Our true affinities of soul.