84 EVIDENCE AND EXAMPLES. 



forces of Nature herself: the sun does not shine as it 

 once shone, nor the rivers sparkle, and modern winds 

 so distort foliage that artists cannot draw it. The man 

 who (in every age) declares we are shooting Niagara, 

 and the woman who (in every age) says that servants 

 are not what they were in her grandmother's time, will 

 be found to have well-curved upper spines and limited 

 hair growth. 



It is, as has already been remarked, when we come 

 to the poets that we find among them men who in their 

 lives and in their writings exhibit most strikingly the 

 various passions. Of the profoundly impassioned nature 

 of certain poets it is needless to speak. They also 

 were what they were, and wrote what they wrote, by a 

 compelling intellectual organisation, although not by 

 any means uninfluenced by the " thwartirigs and 

 furtherings of circumstance/' It is remarkable that 

 among the poets we find the more upright spine, the 

 flatter back, the longer neck, and the backward poise of 

 the head. By no possibility could the artists who draw 

 them bring the refractory and defiant figures of 

 Burns and Byron and Goethe (we may be sure they 

 tried to do so) to curve in any degree similar to the 

 curves of Ruskin, or Newman, or Johnson, or Napoleon. 

 By no possible furtherings of circumstances could one 

 of these latter not unpleasingly curved spines have 

 written " To Mary in Heaven" or "The Dying 

 Gladiator." 



In physical construction and pose the more im- 

 passioned novelists (or their impassioned characters 

 whose bodily appearance is made known to us) resemble 

 the impassioned poets. We have unquestionably poets 

 and novelists of great power and distinction who are 

 not deeply emotional. Neither Cardinal Newman nor 



