e loftiest, perhaps, in its aim and
flight of all poems, it is also the most individual; the writer's own
life is chronicled in it, as well as the issues and upshot of all
things. It is at once the mirror to all time of the sins and perfections
of men, of the judgments and grace of God, and the record, often the
only one, of the transient names, and local factions, and obscure
ambitions, and forgotten crimes of the poet's own day; and in that awful
company to which he leads us, in the most unearthly of his scenes, we
never lose sight of himself. And when this peculiarity sends us to
history, it seems as if the poem which was to hold such a place in
Christian literature hung upon and grew out of chance events, rather
than the deliberate design of its author. History, indeed, here, as
generally, is but a feeble exponent of the course of growth in a great
mind and great ideas. It shows us early a bent and purpose--the man
conscious of power and intending to use it--and then the accidents among
which he worked; but how the current of purpose threaded its way among
them, how it was thrown back, deflected, deepened by them, we cannot
learn from history.

It presents a broken and mysterious picture. A boy of quick and
enthusiastic temper grows up into youth in a dream of love. The lady of
his mystic passion dies early. He dreams of her still, not as a wonder
of earth, but as a saint in paradise, and relieves his heart in an
autobiography, a strange and perplexing work of fiction--quaint and
subtle enough for a metaphysical conceit; but, on the other hand, with
far too much of genuine and deep feeling. It is a first essay; he closes
it abruptly as if dissatisfied with his work, but with the resolution of
raising at a future day a worthy monument to the memory of her whom he
has lost. It is the promise and purpose of a great work. But a prosaic
change seems to come over his half-ideal character. The lover becomes
the student--the student of the thirteenth century--struggling painfully
against difficulties, eager and hot after knowledge, wasting eyesight
and stinting sleep, subtle, inquisitive, active-minded and sanguine, but
omnivorous, overflowing with dialectical forms, loose in premise and
ostentatiously rigid in syllogism, fettered by the refinements of
half-awakened taste and the mannerisms of the Provencals.

Boethius and Cicero and the mass of mixed learning within his reach are
accepted as the consolation of his human g