A grand View of the Universe, everywhere the sound (unhappily
_far of,_ as it were) of a valiant, genuine Human Soul: this,
even under rhyme, is a satisfaction worth some struggling for.
But indeed you are very perverse; and through this perplexed
undiaphanous element, you do not fall on me like radiant summer
rainbows, like floods of sunlight, but with thin piercing
radiances which affect me like the light of the _stars._ It is
so: I wish you would become _concrete,_ and write in prose the
straightest way; but under any form I must put up with you;
that is my lot.--Chapman's edition, as you probably know, is very
beautiful. I believe there are enough of ardent silent seekers
in England to buy up this edition from him, and resolutely study
the same: as for the review multitude, they dare not exactly
call it "unintelligible moonshine," and so will probably hold
their tongue. It is my fixed opinion that we are all at sea as
to what is called Poetry, Art, &c., in these times; laboring
under a dreadful incubus of _Tradition,_ and mere "Cant heaped
balefully on us up to the very Zenith," as men, in nearly all
other provinces of their Life, except perhaps the railway
province, do now labor and stagger;--in a word, that Goethe-and-
Schiller's _"Kunst"_ has far more brotherhood with Pusey-and-
Newman's _Shovelhattery,_ and other the like deplorable
phenomena, than it is in the least aware of! I beg you take
warning: I am more serious in this than you suppose.
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