Helen there was a soft and holy under-stream of thoughtful melancholy, a
high and religious sentiment, that vibrated more exquisitely to the
subtle mysteries of creation, the solemn unison between the bright world
without and the grave destinies of that world within (which is an
imperishable soul), than the lighter and more vivid youthfulness of
Percival had yet conceived. In him lay the germs of the active mortal
who might win distinction in the bold career we run upon the surface of
the earth. In her there was that finer and more spiritual essence which
lifts the poet to the golden atmosphere of dreams, and reveals in
glimpses to the saint the choral Populace of Heaven. We do not say that
Helen would ever have found the utterance of the poet, that her reveries,
undefined and unanalyzed, could have taken the sharp, clear form of
words; for to the poet practically developed and made manifest to the
world, many other gifts besides the mere poetic sense are needed,--stern
study, and logical generalization of scattered truths, and patient
observation of the characters of men, and the wisdom that comes from
sorrow and passion, and a sage's experience of things actual, embracing
the dark secrets of human infirmity and crime. But despite all that has
been said in disparagement or disbelief of "mute, inglorious Miltons," we
maintain that there are natures in which the divinest element of poetry
exists, the purer and more delicate for escaping from bodily form and
evaporating from the coarser vessels into which the poet, so called, must
pour the ethereal fluid. There is a certain virtue within us,
comprehending our subtlest and noblest emotions, which is poetry while
untold, and grows pale and poor in proportion as we strain it into poems.
Nay, it may be said of this airy property of our inmost being that, more
or less, it departs from us according as we give it forth into the world,
even, as only by the loss of its particles, the rose wastes its perfume
on the air. So this more spiritual sensibility dwelt in Helen as the
latent mesmerism in water, as the invisible fairy in an enchanted ring.