We
are very clumsy writers of history. We tell the chronicle of parentage,
birth, birthplace, schooling, schoolmates, earning of money, marriage,
publication of books, celebrity, death; and when we have come to an
end of this gossip, no ray of relation appears between it and the
goddess-born; and it seems as if, had we dipped at random into the
"Modern Plutarch," and read any other life there, it would have fitted
the poems as well, It is the essence of poetry to spring, like the
rainbow daughter of Wonder, from the invisible, to abolish the past,
and refuse all history. Malone, Warburton, Dyce, and Collier, have
wasted their oil. The famed theaters, Covent Garden, Drury Lane, the
Park, and Tremont, have vainly assisted. Betterton, Garrick, Kemble,
Kean, and Macready, dedicate their lives to this genius; him they
crown, elucidate, obey, and express. The genius knows them not. The
recitation begins; one golden word leaps out immortal from all this
painted pedantry, and sweetly torments us with invitations to its own
inaccessible homes. I remember, I went once to see the Hamlet of a
famed performer, the pride of the English stage; and all I then heard,
and all I now remember, of the tragedian, was that in which the
tragedian had no part; simply, Hamlet's question to the ghost,--
"What may this mean,
That thou, dead corse, again in complete steel
Revisit'st thus the glimpses of the moon?"
That imagination which dilates the closet he writes into the world's
dimension, crowds it with agents in rank and order, as quickly reduces
the big reality to be the glimpses of the moon.
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