I am sincerely glad that he has bidden farewell to all small poems, and is devoting himself to his great work, grandly imprisoning, while it deifies, his attention and feelings within the sacred circle and temple-walls of great objects and elevated conceptions. In those little poems, his own corrections coming of necessity so often—at the end of every fourteen or twenty lines, or whatever the poem might chance to be—wore him out; difference of opinion with his best friends irritated him, and he wrote, at times, too much with a sectarian spirit, in a sort of bravado. But now he is at the helm of a noble bark; now he sails right onward; it is all open ocean and a steady breeze, and he drives before it, unfretted by short tacks, reefing and unreefing the sails, hauling and disentangling the ropes. His only disease is the having been out of his element; his return to it is food to famine; it is both the specific remedy and the condition of health.
THE INCOMMUNICABLE
Without drawing, I feel myself but half invested with language. Music, too, is wanting to me. But yet, though one should unite poetry, draftsman's skill, and music, the greater and, perhaps, nobler, certainly all the subtler, parts of one's nature must be solitary. Man exists herein to himself and to God alone—yea! in how much only to God! how much lies below his own consciousness!
The tree or sea-weed like appearance of the side of the mountain, all white with snow, made by little bits of snow loosened. Introduce this and the stones leaping rabbit-like down on my sopha of sods. [Vide p. 60.]
The sunny mist, the luminous gloom of Plato.
TIME AN ELEMENT OF GRIEF