From the expiring
volcano in his bosom his genius, in this poem, casts upon the world a
lurid flame, making life look pale or fever-flushed. With unslumbering
vivacity, human nature is exhibited in that misleading light made by
the bursting of half-truths that relate to its lower side, a light the
more deceptions from the sparkling accompaniment of satire and wit.
Above the pungent secularities, the nimble intellectualities, the
specious animalism, the derisive skepticism, the snapping
personalities, the witty worldliness, that interlace and constitute
the successive cantos of "Don Juan," the passages just quoted and
similar ones (they are not many) rise, as above the desires and the
discontents, the plots and contentions, the shrewd self-seekings of a
heated, noisy city rises a Gothic spire, aspiring, beautiful, drawing
most of its beauty from its aspiration, on whose pinnacle, calmly
glistening in the upper air, plays the coming and the parting day,
while shadows fill the streets below, and whose beauty throws over the
town a halo that beckons men from afar. The spire, in its steadfast
tranquillity and its beauty, so unlike the restless wrangling
dissonance below it, grew nevertheless out of the same hearts that
make the dissonance, and, typifying what is spiritual and eternal in
them, tends by its ideal presence to enlarge and uplift those by whose
eyes it is sought.
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