impulses of passion, ambition, and vanity, which again hurried him off
into the crowd, and entangled him in its interests; and though it may be
granted that he would have been more purely and abstractedly the
_poet_, had he been less thoroughly, in all his pursuits and
propensities, the _man_, yet from this very mixture and alloy has it
arisen that his pages bear so deeply the stamp of real life, and that in
the works of no poet, with the exception of Shakspeare, can every
various mood of the mind--whether solemn or gay, whether inclined to the
ludicrous or the sublime, whether seeking to divert itself with the
follies of society or panting after the grandeur of solitary
nature--find so readily a strain of sentiment in accordance with its
every passing tone.

But while the naturally warm cast of his affections and temperament gave
thus a substance and truth to his social feelings which those of too
many of his fellow votaries of Genius have wanted, it was not to be
expected that an imagination of such range and power should have been so
early developed and unrestrainedly indulged without producing, at last,
some of those effects upon the heart which have invariably been found
attendant on such a predominance of this faculty. It must have been
observed, indeed, that the period when his natural affections flourished
most healthily was before he had yet arrived at the full consciousness
of his genius,--before Imagination had yet accustomed him to those
glowing pictures, after gazing upon which all else appeared cold and
colourless. From the moment of this initiation into the wonders of his
own mind, a distaste for the realities of life began to grow upon him.
Not even that intense craving after affection, which nature had
implanted in him, could keep his ardour still alive in a pursuit whose
results fell so short of his "imaginings;" and though, from time to
time, the combined warmth of his fancy and temperament was able to call
up a feeling which to his eyes wore the semblance of love, it may be
questioned whether his heart had ever much share in such passions, or
whether, after his first launch into the boundless sea of imagination,
he could ever have been brought back and fixed by any lasting
attachment. Actual objects there were, in but too great number, who, as
long as the illusion continued, kindled up his thoughts and were the
themes of his song. But they were, after all, little more than mere
dreams of the hour;--t