And this is the “American Drama” of ——! Well!—that “Conscience which makes cowards of us all” will permit me to say, in praise of the performance, only that it is not quite so bad as I expected it to be. But then I always expect too much.
41.
What we feel to be Fancy will be found fanciful still, whatever be the theme which engages it. No subject exalts it into Imagination. When Moore is termed “a fanciful poet,” the epithet is applied with precision. He is. He is fanciful in “Lalla Rookh,” and had he written the “Inferno,” in the “Inferno” he would have contrived to be still fanciful and nothing beyond.
42.
When we speak of “a suspicious man,” we may mean either one who suspects, or one to be suspected. Our language needs either the adjective “suspectful,” or the adjective “suspectable.”
43.
“To love,” says Spencer, “is
“To fawn, to crouch, to wait, to ride, to run,
To speed, to give, to want, to be undone.”
The philosophy, here, might be rendered more profound, by the mere omission of a comma. We all know the willing blindness—the voluntary madness of Love. We express this in thus punctuating the last line: