condensed into a single life! No, theirs must be rather the intuitive knowledge that springs from sympathy with all things, animate and inanimate, in summer and winter, in light and darkness, in sorrow and in joy—a sympathy receiving freely as it gives, and thus cozening them out of nine-tenths of their own private sorrows, which such liner temperaments as theirs would otherwise be too sensitive to endure.
The wide scope of this sympathy, the facility with which genius can handle extreme contrasts of the same passion with equal skill, is, I think, finely exemplified in the two poems of "Maud" and "Guinevere." I have already compared the latter to an exquisite piece of sculpture. The former seems to me like a wild, fanciful, highly-coloured painting, in which some true artist has striven to embody the unattainable conceptions of a dream. Was ever colouring
