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healthiness of his mind had to do with keeping him from the 
pitfalls into which others stumbled and fell. We know how 
superb a poet was Christopher Marlowe ; and for his ‘‘ mighty 
line” we have nothing but homage; but, as a pure artist how 
far he comes below Shakspere. The latter would scarcely have 
permitted himself to write such a passage as this : 
Now Faustus let thine eyes with horror stare 
Into that vast perpetual torture-house : 
There are the furies tossing damned souls 
On burning forks ; there bodies boil in lead; 
There are live quarters broiling on the coals 
That ne’er can die. 
These lines are to be condemned because, so far as they are not 
ludicrous, the feeling which they awaken is one of those which I 
have held to be inadmissible in art—the feeling of unmitigated 
horror. No wise artist would attempt the delineation of such a 
scene. And yet if, on the other hand, we want an instance—a 
typical instance—of entirely legitimate art —art as perfect in con- 
ception as in expression, we have only to turn over the pages of 
that same drama from which I have just quoted—the Faustus of 
Marlowe—and we come upon this divine speech : 
Was this the face that launch’d a thousand ships, 
And burnt the topmost towers of Ilium ? 
Sweet Helen make me immortal with a kiss— 
O, thou art fairer than the evening air, 
Clad in the beauty of a thousand stars ; 
Brighter art thou than flaming Jupiter, 
When he appeared to hapless Semele ; 
More lovely than the monarch of the sky 
In wanton Arethusa’s azur’d arms. 
I suppose it will be admitted that we have had no more 
consummate artist among modern poets than Samuel Taylor 
Coleridge. In saying this we are thinking of the quality of his 
work rather than of its quantity. It was his speciality, perhaps, 
that while he had the power, with the best, to do the best and 
highest work, he had also that which some of them lacked—the 
power to tell why he had done it. Study of him, therefore, is 
profitable both to painter and to poet. Note the splendid pictorial 
character of the Ancient Mariner ; and observe how a single vivid 
phrase gives life and vigour to what might otherwise have been 
a dead presentment :— 
The bride hath paced into the hall, 
Red as a rose is she; 
Nodding their heads before her goes 
The merry minstrelsy. 
“Nodding their heads’’—those are the words which give the 
breath of life to the picture. As an instance of artistic grasp and 
