time in following "the beaten track." And if at times he makes an apology which is almost a boast for the vagaries of his genius, and protests that he has lost his way among the winding cross-roads of poesy, or has been swept from his theme like a vessel reeling amid the shifting gusts of a storm-wind, these professions of negligence will hardly impose upon a reader who observes that the poet sees his own irregularity, proclaims it, and profits by it—that the traveller is aware of his deviation from the path, and reaches home the sooner—that the vessel sets her sails to catch the side-winds, and is all the earlier in port.
One point, however, Pindar has in common with the Improvisatore. Each starts with, as it were, a ready-made assortment of thoughts, images, phrases, derived from early education in his profession, which supply the crude material of his poetry. Neither, if we may be allowed the figure, creates the threads of which he spins his web. But the Improvisatore cannot even pause to select his materials, or to ponder on their arrangement; he must take them as he can get them, and dispose them in such order as the impression of the moment suggests. This is inevitable when the work is really being produced against time. Pindar, on the contrary, however he may affect to work without a plan, is master of his work from first to last; he exults in this mastery, and exercises it with all his might, grudging no labour and no thought which he can expend on its exercise. He may say, like Shakespeare's Antony, "I only speak right on;" but we can see that it is not so. His selection of his
