led."

These three passages are from a poem in which there is more wit than
poetry, and more cynicism than either; a poem in spirit unsanctified,
Mephistophelian, written by a man of the world, a terrible
egotist, _blase_ already in early manhood, in whose life, through
organization, inherited temperament, and miseducation, humanity was so
cramped, distorted, envenomed, that the best of it was in the fiery
sway of the more urgent passions, his inmost life being, as it must
always be with poets, inwoven into his verse. From the expiring
volcano in his bosom his genius, in this poem, casts upon the world a
lurid flame, making life look pale or fever-flushed. With unslumbering
vivacity, human nature is exhibited in that misleading light made by
the bursting of half-truths that relate to its lower side, a light the
more deceptions from the sparkling accompaniment of satire and wit.

Above the pungent secularities, the nimble intellectualities, the
specious animalism, the derisive skepticism, the snapping
personalities, the witty worldliness, that interlace and constitute
the successive cantos of "Don Juan," the passages just quoted and
similar ones (they are not many) rise, as above the desires and the
discontents, the plots and contentions, the shrewd self-seekings of a
heated, noisy city rises a Gothic spire, aspiring, beautiful, drawing
most of its beauty from its aspiration, on whose pinnacle, calmly
glistening in the upper air, plays the coming and the parting day,
while shadows fill the streets below, and whose beauty throws over the
town a halo that beckons men from afar. The spire, in its steadfast
tranquillity and its beauty, so unlike the restless wrangling
dissonance below it, grew nevertheless out of the same hearts that
make the dissonance, and, typifying what is spiritual and eternal in
them, tends by its ideal presence to enlarge and uplift those by whose
eyes it is sought. These upshootings in "Don Juan" irradiate the
cantos, giving an attractiveness which draws to them eyes that
otherwise would not have known them; and if too pure in their light
and too remote to mingle directly with the flare and flash that dazzle
without illuminating, silently they shine and steadily, an unconscious
heavenly influence, above these coruscations of earthly
thoughts,--thoughts telling from their lively numerousness, but
neither grand nor deep.

From the same solar center fall frequently single rays that make lines
and st