How wonderful, how exhaustive, and how practical seems the familiarity of great poets with the niceties and workings of the human heart! It has been said of them, prettily enough, that
“They learn in suffering what they teach in song.”
God forbid! If it were so, their lot would indeed be unenviable; and what an eternity of torture would such a genius as Byron, or Shelley, or Tennyson himself have condensed into a single life! No, theirs must be rather the intuitive knowledge that springs from sympathy with all things, animate and inanimate, in summer and winter, in light and darkness, in sorrow and in joy—a sympathy receiving freely as it gives, and thus cozening them out of nine-tenths of their own private sorrows, which such finer temperaments as theirs would otherwise be too sensitive to endure.
The wide scope of this sympathy, the facility with which genius can handle extreme contrasts of the same passion with equal skill, is, I think, finely exemplified in the two poems of “Maud” and “Guinevere.” I have already compared the latter to an exquisite piece of sculpture. The former seems to me like a wild, fanciful, highly-coloured painting, in which some true artist has striven to embody the unattainable conceptions of a dream. Was ever colouring mixed on palette more vivid and glowing than this description of a lover waiting for his mistress in her garden—
“There falls a splendid tear
From the passion-flower at the gate;
She is coming—my dove, my dear!
She is coming—my life, my fate!
The red rose cries, She is near—she is near!
The white rose weeps,—She is late!