“The splendor falls on castle walls
And snowy summits old in story:
The long light shakes across the lakes,
And the wild cataract leaps in glory.
Blow, bugle, blow, set the wild echoes flying,
Blow, bugle; answer, echoes, dying, dying, dying.”
Admirable after its kind, a kind of which it might seem unfair to say that less is meant than meets the ear; but set it beside the Wordsworth couplet, so easy, so simple,—
“Without all ornament, itself and true,”—
so inevitable and yet so impossible. One is cheap in its materials, but divine in its birth and in its effect; the other is made of rare and costly stuffs, but when all is done it is made. Though it sound old-fashioned to say so, there is no art like inspiration.
The supreme achievement of poetic genius is not the writing of beautiful passages, but the conception and evolution of great poems,—the whole, even in a work of the imagination, being greater than any of its parts; but poetic inspiration reaches its highest jet, if we may so speak, its ultimate bloom, in occasional lines of transcendent and, as human judgment goes, perfect loveliness. I should like to see a rigorously sifted collection of such fragments, an anthology of magical verse, nothing less than magic being admitted. It would be a small volume,—