If We Had Been Consulted, The Backbone Of The
Earth Would Have Been Made, Not Of Granite, But Of Bristol Spar.
A Modern Author Would Have Died In Infancy In A Ruder Age.
But
the poet is something more than a scald, "a smoother and polisher
of language"; he is a Cincinnatus in literature, and occupies no
west end of the world.
Like the sun, he will indifferently
select his rhymes, and with a liberal taste weave into his verse
the planet and the stubble.
In these old books the stucco has long since crumbled away, and
we read what was sculptured in the granite. They are rude and
massive in their proportions, rather than smooth and delicate in
their finish. The workers in stone polish only their chimney
ornaments, but their pyramids are roughly done. There is a
soberness in a rough aspect, as of unhewn granite, which
addresses a depth in us, but a polished surface hits only the
ball of the eye. The true finish is the work of time, and the
use to which a thing is put. The elements are still polishing
the pyramids. Art may varnish and gild, but it can do no more.
A work of genius is rough-hewn from the first, because it
anticipates the lapse of time, and has an ingrained polish, which
still appears when fragments are broken off, an essential quality
of its substance. Its beauty is at the same time its strength,
and it breaks with a lustre.
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