R. le Gallienne.
Mr. le Gallienne was not the first to complain that poetic subjects were exhausted. A recent Spectator quotes the following from Choerilus, a Samian poet of the Fifth Century, B.C. (2,000 years before Shakespeare): “Happy was the follower of the muses in that time, when the field was still virgin soil. But now when all has been divided up and the arts have reached their limits, we are left behind in the race, and, look where’er we may, there is no room anywhere for a new-yoked chariot to make its way to the front.” (St. John Thackeray, Anthologia Graeca).
Go out into the woods and valleys, when your heart is rather harassed than bruised, and when you suffer from vexation more than grief. Then the trees all hold out their arms to you to relieve you of the burthen of your heavy thoughts; and the streams under the trees glance at you as they run by, and will carry away your trouble along with the fallen leaves; and the sweet-breathing air will draw it off together with the silver multitudes of the dew. But let it be with anguish or remorse in your heart that you go forth into Nature, and instead of your speaking her language, you make her speak yours. Your distress is then infused through all things and clothes all things, and Nature only echoes and seems to authenticate your self-loathing or your hopelessness. Then you find the device of your sorrow on the argent shield of the moon, and see all the trees of the field weeping and wringing their hands with you, while the hills, seated at your side in sackcloth, look down upon you prostrate, and reprove you like the comforters of Job.
Robert Alfred Vaughan (1823-1857) (Hours with the Mystics).
If this fine writer had lived, much might have been expected of him. He is one of the many instances of “the fatal thirty-fours and thirty-sevens.”
First man appeared in the class of inorganic things,
Next he passed therefrom into that of plants,
For years he lived as one of the plants,