The poet appears to be the only person who refers everything
to his moral consciousness, and raves over that absence of design
and beneficence of purpose which he so unceasingly displays
himself. There is something sublime in this transfusion of all
the social, material, and spiritual phenomena of the universe
into the alembic of one mind, and finding all dross ; in this
summoning of the elements which furnish forth the whole of
creation to the bar of his individual judgment, and the repu-
diation of all as worthless. But this is not the spirit for
entering into the soul of things, for appreciating historic events,
for weighing human action, or casting characters in the moulds
of truth. It would be idle to expect from a state of mind so
radically unsound, any ideal glimpses into that state of per-



208 ESTIMATE OF MODERN ENGLISH POETS.
fection to which man may not unreasonably aspire. Such a
class of mind is competent to destroy, but it cannot possibly
build up. It may represent with great vigour the darker phases
of the past and the present, or the proud and restless agitations
of unquiet minds ; but the quieter aspects of humanity are to
it a sealed book. The development of any action evolving
good out of evil, or the expansion of the social virtues under cir-
cumstances calculated to stifle their growth, or the construc-
tion of an ideal future exhibiting a practical outlet from the
miseries of the present, — of these things it knows nothing.
