"
That he did these tasks so well, proves how well he could have done,
by the side of them, the then more urgent task. In 1828, Mr.
Carlyle wrote for one of the quarterly reviews an exposition of
"Goethe's Helena," which is a kind of episode in the second part of
"Faust," and was first published as a fragment. This takes up more
than sixty pages in the first volume of the "Miscellanies," about the
half being translations from "Helena," which by no means stands in the
front rank of Goethe's poetic creations, which is indeed rather a high
artistic composition than a creation. At that time there lay, almost
uncalled for, on the publisher's shelf, where it had lain for five
years, ever since its issue, a poem of fifty-five Spenserian stanzas,
flushed with a subtler beauty, more divinely dyed in pathos, than any
in English literature of its rare kind, or of any kind out of
Shakespeare,--a poem in which all the inward harvests of a tender,
deep, capacious, loving, and religious life, all the heaped hoards of
feeling and imagination in a life most visionary and most real, are
gathered into one sheaf of poetic affluence, to dazzle and subdue with
excess of light,--or gathered rather into a bundle of sheaves, stanza
rising on stanza, each like a flame fresh shooting from a hidden bed
of Nature's most precious perfumes, each shedding a new and
a richer fragrance; I mean the "Adonais" of Shelley.
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