content between thought and reality, as it were in an intermundium of
which their own living spirit supplies the substance, and their
imagination the ever-varying form; the latter must impress their
preconceptions on the world without, in order to present them back to
their own view with the satisfying degree of clearness, distinctness,
and individuality. These in tranquil times are formed to exhibit a
perfect poem in palace, or temple, or landscape-garden; or a tale of
romance in canals that join sea with sea, or in walls of rock, which,
shouldering back the billows, imitate the power, and supply the
benevolence of nature to sheltered navies; or in aqueducts that,
arching the wide vale from mountain to mountain, give a Palmyra to the
desert. But alas! in times of tumult they are the men destined to come
forth as the shaping spirit of ruin, to destroy the wisdom of ages in
order to substitute the fancies of a day, and to change kings and
kingdoms, as the wind shifts and shapes the clouds [8]. The records of
biography seem to confirm this theory. The men of the greatest genius,
as far as we can judge from their own works or from the accounts of
their contemporaries, appear to have been of calm and tranquil temper
in all that related to themselves. In the inward assurance of
permanent fame, they seem to have been either indifferent or resigned
with regard to immediate reputation. Through all the works of Chaucer
there reigns a cheerfulness, a manly hilarity which makes it almost
impossible to doubt a correspondent habit of feeling in the author
himself. Shakespeare's evenness and sweetness of temper were almost
proverbial in his own age. That this did not arise from ignorance of
his own comparative greatness, we have abundant proof in his Sonnets,
which could scarcely have been known to Pope [9], when he asserted,
that our great bard--

------grew immortal in his own despite.