'I tax you not, you elements, with unkindness.'
Surely that is logical; that is a distinction not without a difference, and appreciable to the human mind, as it is constituted,—surely that is a point worth putting in the arts and sciences.
'I never gave you kingdoms, called you children;
You owe me no subscription; why, then, let fall
Your horrible pleasure? Here I stand your slave,
A poor, infirm, weak, and despised old man;
But yet, I call you servile ministers,
That have with two pernicious daughters joined
Your high, engendered battles 'gainst a head
So old and white as this. O, O, 'tis foul.'
And in his calmer mood, when the storm has done its work upon him, and all the strength of his great passion is exhausted,—when his bodily powers are fast sinking under it, and like the subtle Hamlet's 'potent poison,' it begins at last to 'o'er-crow his spirit'—when he is faint with struggling with its fury, wet to the skin with it, and comfortless and shivering, he still maintains through his chattering teeth the argument; he will still defend his first position—
'Thou thinkst 'tis much that this contentious storm
Invades us to the skin; so 'tis to thee,
But where the greater malady is fixed,
The lesser is scarce felt.'
'The tempest in my mind
Doth from my senses take all feeling else,
Save what beats there.'
'In such a night
To shut me out! Pour on, I will endure.
In such a night as this.'
And when the shelter he is at last forced to seek is found, at the door his courage fails him; and he shrinks back into the storm again, because 'it will not give him leave to think on that which hurts him more.'
So nicely does the Poet balance these ills, and report the swaying movement. But it is a poet who does not take common-place opinions on this, or on any other such subject. He is one whose poetic work does not consist in illustrating these received opinions, or in finding some novel and fine expression for them. He is observing nature, and undertaking to report it, as it is, not as it should be according to these preconceptions, or according to the established poetic notions of the heroic requisitions.
But there is no stage that can exhibit his experiment here in its real significance, excepting that one which he himself builds for us; for it is the vast lonely heath, and the Man, the pigmy man, on it—and the KING, the pigmy king, on it;—it is all the wild roar of elemental nature, and the tempest in that 'little world of man,' that have to measure their forces, that have to be brought into continuous and persevering contest. It is not Gloster only, who sees in that storm what 'makes him think that a man is but a worm.'