The poet's poem is never so fine as the poet's thought.
The thought is from the immortal and invincible soul,--the poem has
to be conveyed through the grosser body, clothed in language which
must always be narrow and inadequate. Hence the artist's many and
grievous limitations. To the eyes of the spirit all things appear
transfigured, because lifted out of the sphere of material vision.
But when we try to put these "beautiful things made new, for the
delight of the sky-children" on paper or canvas, in motionless
marble or flexible rhyme,--we are weighted by grosser air and the
density of bodily feeling. So it was with Angela Sovrani, iwhose
compact little head were folded the splendid dreams of genius like
sleeping fairies in a magic cave;--and thoughtful and brilliant
though she was, she could not, in her great tenderness for her
affianced lover Florian Varillo, foresee that daily contact with his
weaker and smaller nature, would kill those dreams as surely as a
frost-wind kills the buds of the rose,--and that gradually, very
gradually, the coarser fibre of his intelligence mingling with hers,
would make a paltry and rough weaving of the web of life, instead of
a free and gracious pattern. She never thought of such
possibilities--she would have rejected the very idea of them with
scorn and indignation.
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