; with using
experience not as an intoxicant but as a staple of diet; with considering
fact not as the raw material of inspiration but as inspiration itself.
Between an artist of this sort--pedestrian, good-tempered, touched with
malice, a little cynical--and the noble desperadoes of 1830 there could
be little sympathy; and there seems no reason why the one should be the
others' historian, and none why, if their historian he should be, his
history should be other than partial and narrow--than at best an
achievement in special pleading. But Champfleury's was a personality
apart. His master quality was curiosity; he was interested in
everything, and he was above all things interested in men and women; he
had a liberal mind and no prejudices; he had the scientific spirit and
the scientific intelligence, if he sometimes spoke with the voice of the
humourist and in the terms of the artist in words; and his studies in
romanticism are far better literature than his experiments in fiction.

LONGFELLOW

Sea Poets.

The ocean as confidant, a Laertes that can neither avoid his Hamlets nor
bid them hold their peace, is a modern invention. Byron and Shelley
discovered it; Heine took it into his confidence, and told it the story
of his loves; Wordsworth made it a moral influence; Browning loved it in
his way, but his way was not often the poet's; to Matthew Arnold it was
the voice of destiny, and its message was a message of despair; Hugo
conferred with it as with an humble friend, and uttered such lofty things
over it as are rarely heard upon the lips of man. And so with living
lyrists each after his kind. Lord Tennyson listens and looks until it
strikes him out an undying note of passion, or yearning, or regret--

'Sunset and evening star,
And one clear call for me';

Mr. Swinburne maddens with the wind and the sounds and the scents of it,
until there passes into his verse a something of its vastness and its
vehemency, the rapture of its inspiration, the palpitating,
many-twinkling miracle of its light; Mr. William Morris has been taken
with the manner of its melancholy; while to Whitman it has been 'the
great Camerado' indeed, for it gave him that song of the brown bird
bereft of his mate in whose absence the half of him had not been told to
us.

Longfellow.

But to Longfellow alone was it given to see that stately galley which
Count Arnaldos saw; his only to hear the steersman singing that w