JAMES GATES PERCIVAL. 135 



they are but feeble exotics in our healthier air. Without 

 faith or hope, and deprived of that outward 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, 



&quot; To eat into themselves, for lack 

 Of other thing to hew and hack.&quot; 



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 phenomena 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 them 

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

 who gave proof of a certain feebleness of character which 

 rendered 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, in proclaiming himself a neglected Columbus, 



