90 CARLYLE. 



this. He had a surprising extemporary vigour of mind ; his 

 phrase carries great weight of blow ; he undoubtedly sur 

 passed all contemporaries, as Cowper says of him, in a 

 certain rude and earth-born vigour ; but his verse is dust 

 and ashes now, solemnly inurned, of course, in the Chalmers 

 columbarium, and without danger of violation. His brawn 

 and muscle are fading traditions, while the fragile, shivering 

 genius of Cowper is still a good life on the books of the 

 v ^&quot;Critical Insurance Office. * Is it not, then, loftiness of mind 

 v that puts one by the side of Virgil ? cries poor old Cavalcanti 

 at his wits end. Certainly not altogether that. There must 

 ,- be also the great Mantuan s art; his power, not only of being 



strong in parts, but of making those parts coherent in an 

 harmonious whole, and tributary to it. Gray, if we may 

 believe the commentators, has not an idea, scarcely an 

 epithet, that he can call his own, and yet he is, in the best 

 sense, one of the classics of English literature. He had 

 exquisite felicity of choice ; his dictionary had no vulgar 

 word in it, no harsh one, but all culled from the luckiest 

 moods of poets, and with a faint but delicious aroma of 

 association ; he had a perfect sense of sound, and one idea 

 without which all the poetic outfit (si absit prudentid) is of 

 little avail, that of combination and arrangement, in short, 

 of art. The poets from whom he helped himself have no 

 more claim to any of his poems as wholes, than the various 

 beauties of Greece (if the old story were true) to the Venus of 

 the artist. 



,&amp;gt; Imagination, as we have said, has more virtue to keep a 

 book alive than any other single faculty. Burke is rescued 

 from the usual doom of orators because his learning, his ex 

 perience, his sagacity are rimmed with a halo by this 

 bewitching light behind the intellectual eye from the highest 

 heaven of the brain. Shakespeare has impregnated his 

 common sense with the steady glow of it, and answers the 

 mood of youth and age, of high and low, immortal as that 

 dateless substance of the soul he wrought in. To have any 

 chance of lasting, a book must satisfy, not merely some 

 fleeting fancy of the day, but a constant longing and hunger 

 of human nature ; and it needs only a superficial study of 

 literature to be convinced that real fame depends rather on 

 the sum of an author s powers than on any brilliancy of 

 special parts. There must be wisdom as well as wit, sense 



