They are queer birds, too, these writers of commentaries upon literature.
At one time in my life I myself absorbed such "critical literature" with a morbid avidity, as if it had been a drug; and a drug it is--a drug dulling one to all fine and fresh sensations--a drug from the effects of which I am only now, at this late hour, beginning slowly to recover. They set one upon a completely wrong track, bringing forward what is unessential and throwing what is essential into thebackground. Dear heavens! how well I recall those grey discriminations. Wordsworth was the fellow who hit upon the idea of the _anima mundi._ Shelley's "philosophy of life" differed from Wordsworth's in that _his_ universal spirit was a thing of pure Love, whereas the other's was a matter of pure Thought.
Pure Love! Pure Thought! Was there ever such petrifying of the evasive flame? "Words! Words! Words!" I suspect that the book the sweet Prince was reading when he met Polonius in the passage was a book of essays on the poets.
The worst of this historical-comical-philosophical way of going to work is that it leaves one with the feeling that poetry is a sort of intellectual game, entirely removed from the jostling pressure of actual life, and that poets when once dead are shoved into their academic pigeon-holes to be labelled like things under glass cases. The person who can rattle off such descriptive labels the quickest is the person of culture. Thus history swallows up poetry; thus the "comparative method" swallows up history; and the whole business is snatched away from the magical flow of real life and turned into the dreariness of a mausoleum. How refreshing, how salutary, to turn from all thoughts as to what Byron's "place in literature" was to such thrilling poetry as
"She walks in beauty like the night Of cloudless climes and starry skies, And all that's best of dark and bright Meet in her aspect and her eyes--"
or to such sonorous lines full of the reverberating echoes of pent-up passion as those which begin
One has only to recall the way these simple careless outbursts have burned themselves in upon one's lips, when one's feelings were stirred to the old tune, to realise how great a poet Byron was.