He read poetry for
the most part with earnest, critical eye, striving to account for it,
to connect it with the tendencies of the age, or he read to find
sympathy with his own aspirations after heroic energy. He read De
Vigny and other French poets of his generation, with an eye to their
relations to the convulsed and struggling state of France, and because
they were compelled by their surroundings to take life _au serieux_,
and to pursue, with all the resources of their art, something
different from beauty in the abstract. Luxurious passive enjoyment or
torpid half-enjoyment must have been a comparatively rare condition of
his finely-strung, excitable, and fervid system. I believe that his
moral earnestness was too imperious to permit much of this. He was
capable indeed of the most passionate admiration of beauty, but even
that feeling seems to have been interpenetrated by a certain militant
apostolic fervor; his love was as the love of a religious soldier for
a patron saint who extends her aid and countenance to him in his wars.
I do not mean to say that his mind was in a perpetual glow: I mean
only that this surrender to impassioned transports was more
characteristic of the man than serene openness to influx of enjoyment.
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