LIFE AND LETTERS OF JAMES GATES PERC1VAL. 143 



ward support in the habitual procession of events and in the 

 authoritative limitations of thought which in ordinary times 

 gives steadiness to feeble and timid intellects, they are turned 

 inward, and forced, like Hudibras s sword, 



To eat into themselves, for lack 

 Of other thing to hew and hack, 



Compelled to find within them that stay which had hitherto been 

 supplied by creeds and institutions, they learned to attribute to 

 their own consciousness the grandeur which belongs of right 

 only to the mind of the human race, slowly endeavouring after 

 an equilibrium between its desires and the external conditions 

 under which they are attainable. Hence that exaggeration of 

 the individual, and depreciation of the social man, which has 

 become the cant of modern literature. Abundance of such phe 

 nomena accompanied the rise of what was called Romanticism 

 in Germany and France, reacting to some extent even upon 

 England, and consequently America. The smaller poets erected 

 themselves into a kind of guild, into which all were admitted 

 who gave proof of a certain feebleness of character which ren 

 dered them superior to their grosser fellow-men. It was a 

 society of cripples undertaking to teach the new generation how 

 to walk. Meanwhile, the object of their generous solicitude, 

 what with clinging to Mother Past s skirts, and helping itself by 

 every piece of household furniture it could lay hands on, learned, 

 after many a tumble, to get on its legs, and to use them as other 

 generations had done before it. Percival belonged to this new 

 order of bards, weak in the knees, and thinking it healthy 

 exercise to climb the peaks of Dreamland. To the vague and 

 misty views attainable from those sublime summits into his own 

 vast interior, his reports in blank verse and otherwise did ample 

 justice, but failed to excite the appetite of mankind. He spent 

 his life, like others of his class, m proclaiming himself a neg 

 lected Columbus, ever ready to start on his voyage when the 

 public would supply the means of building his ships. Mean 

 while, to be ready at a moment s warning, he packs his mind 

 pellmell like a carpet bag, wraps a geologist s hammer in a shirt 

 with a Byron collar, does up Volney s * Ruins with an odd vo 

 lume of Wordsworth, and another of Bell s Anatomy in a 

 loose sheet of Webster s Dictionary, jams Moore s poems be 

 tween the leaves of Bopp s Grammar and forgets only such 

 small matters as combs and brushes. It never seems to have 

 entered his head that the gulf between genius and its new world 

 is never too wide for a stout swimmer. Like all sentimentalists, 



