4 November 1839 – 10 November 1839

There was one man lived his own healthy Attic life in those days. The words that have come down to us evidence that their speaker was a seer in his day and generation. At this day they owe nothing to their dramatic form, nothing to stage machinery, and the fact that they were spoken under these or those circumstances. All display of art for the gratification of a factitious taste is silently passed by to come at the least particle of absolute and genuine thought they contain. The reader will be disappointed, however, who looks for traits of a rare wisdom or eloquence, and will have to solace himself, for the most part, with the poet's humanity and what it was in him to say. He will discover that, like every genius, he was a solitary liver and worker in his day. We are accustomed to say that the common sense of this age belonged to the seer of the last,—as if time gave him any vantage ground. But not so: I see not but Genius must ever take an equal start, and all the generations of men are virtually at a standstill for it to come and consider of them. Common sense is not so familiar with any truth but Genius will represent it in a strange light to it. Let the seer bring down his broad eye to the most stale and trivial fact, and he will make you believe it a new planet in the sky. As to criticism, man has never to make allowance to man; there is naught to excuse, naught to bear in mind. All the past is here present to be tried; let it approve itself if it can.

I was not aware till to-day of a rising and risen generation. Children appear to me as raw as the fresh fungi on a fence rail. By what degrees of consanguinity is this succulent and rank-growing slip of manhood related to me? What is it but another herb, ranging all the kingdoms of nature, drawing in sustenance by a thousand roots and fibres from all soils.

Prometheus' answer to Io's question, who has bound him to the rock, is a good instance:— Βούλουμα μὲν τὸ δῖον, Ἡφαίστου δὲ χείρ. (The will indeed of Zeus, of Vulcan the hand.) Also:— Πταίσας δὲ τῷδε πρὸς κακῷ, μαθήσεται, Ὅσον τό, τ᾽ ἄρχειν καὶ τὸ δουλούειν δίχα. Such naked speech is the standing aside of words to make room for thoughts.