He mistakes the logic. Wordsworth
does not celebrate any power at all in Paganism. Old Triton indeed! he's
little better, in respect of the terrific, than a mail-coach guard, nor
half as good, if you allow the guard his official seat, a coal-black
night, lamps blazing back upon his royal scarlet, and his blunderbuss
correctly slung. Triton would not stay, I engage, for a second look at the
old Portsmouth mail, as once I knew it. But, alas! better things than ever
stood on Triton's pins are now as little able to stand up for themselves,
or to startle the silent fields in darkness, with the sudden flash of
their glory--gone before it had fall come--as Triton is to play the
Freyschutz chorus on his humbug of a horn. But the logic of Wordsworth is
this--not that the Greek mythology is potent; on the contrary, that it is
weaker than cowslip tea, and would not agitate the nerves of a hen
sparrow; but that, weak as it is--nay, by means of that very weakness--it
does but the better serve to measure the weakness of something which
_he_ thinks yet weaker--viz. the death-like torpor of London society
in 1808, benumbed by conventional apathy and worldliness--
'Heavy as frost, and deep almost as life.'
This seems a digression from Milton, who is properly the subject of this
colloquy. But, luckily, it is not one of _my_ sins. Mr. Landor is lord
within the house of his own book; he pays all accounts whatever; and
readers that have either a bill, or bill of exceptions, to tender against
the concern, must draw upon _him_.
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