thou for me here.'
She sees him vanish into night--
She starts from sleep in deep affright,
For it was not her own true knight.
Though but in dream Gunhilda failed--
Though but a fancied ill assailed--
Though she but fancied fault bewailed--
Yet thought of day makes dream of night;
She is not worthy of the knight;
The inmost altar burns not bright.
If loneliness thou canst not bear--
Cannot the dragon's venom dare--
Of the pure meed thou shouldst despair.
Now sadder that lone maiden sighs;
Far bitterer tears profane her eyes;
Crushed in the dust her heart's flower lies.'
"To show the evident carelessness with which this poem was
constructed, I have italicized an identical rhyme (of about the same
force in versification as an identical proposition in logic) and two
grammatical improprieties. _To lean_ is a neuter verb, and 'seizing
_on_' is not properly to be called a pleonasm, merely because it
is--nothing at all. The concluding line is difficult of pronunciation
through excess of consonants. I should have preferred, indeed, the
ante-penultimate tristich as the _finale_ of the poem.
"The supposition that the book of an author is a thing apart from the
author's self, is, I think, ill-founded. The soul is a cipher, in the
sense of a cryptograph; and the shorter a cryptograph is, the more
difficulty there is in its comprehension--at a certain point of
brevity it would bid defiance to an army of Champollions. And thus
he who has written very little, may in that little either conceal his
spirit or convey quite an erroneous idea of it--of his acquirements,
talents, temper, manner, tenor and depth (or shallowness) of
thought--in a word of his character, of himself. But this is
impossible with him who has written much. Of such a person we get,
from his books, not merely a just, but the most just representation.
Bulwer, the individual, personal man, in a green velvet waistcoat and
amber gloves, is not by any means the veritable Sir Edward Lytton,
who is discoverable only in 'Ernest Maltravers,' where his soul is
deliberately and nakedly set forth. And who would ever know Dickens by
looking at him or talking with him, or doing anything with him except
reading his 'Curiosity Shop?' What poet, in especial, but must feel
at least the better portion of himself more fairly represented in even
his commonest sonnet, (earnestly written,) than in his most elaborate
or most intimate person
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