The man Shelley, in very truth, is not entirely sane, and Shelley's poetry is not entirely sane either. The Shelley of actual life... is a vision of beauty and radiance, indeed, but availing nothing, effecting nothing. And in poetry, no less than in life, he is "a beautiful and ineffectual angel, beating in the void his luminous wings in vain."LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Baudelaire compared the great names in art to lighthouses posted along the track of historic time. The simile, as he used it, seiz...es the imagination and represents a great truth, but it allows of an interpretation which the limits of a sonnet form forbade him to develop. He takes the lights of his beacons as much for granted as the sailor does the lights of real lighthouses. But the lighthouses of art do not burn with so fixed and unvarying a lustre. The light they give is always changing insensibly with each generation, now brighter, now dimmer, and often enough growing bright once more. But we sometimes forget that the lights have to be tended or they grow faint and may expire altogether. For them to burn brightly, they must be fed by the devotion of some few spirits in each generation. If that fails for a long period they go out and become one of those dead, ineffectual names which still linger on, obstructions rather than aids to the historical voyager.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
We talk of civilizing the Indian, but that is not the name for his improvement. By the wary independence and aloofness of his fore...st life he preserves his intercourse with his native gods, and is admitted from time to time to a rare and peculiar society with Nature. He has glances of starry recognition to which our saloons are strangers. The steady illumination of his genius, dim only because distant, is like the faint but satisfying light of the stars compared with the dazzling but ineffectual and short-lived blaze of candles.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
We ought to rejoice greatly in him. He occasionally suggests something a little more than human. You can't confound him with the o...ther inhabitants of Brooklyn or New York. How they must shudder when they read him! He is awfully good. To be sure I sometimes feel a little imposed on. By his heartiness and broad generalities he puts me into a liberal frame of mind prepared to see wonders,--as it were, sets me upon a hill or in the midst of a plain,--stirs me well up, and then--throws in a thousand of brick. Though rude, and sometimes ineffectual, it is a great primitive poem,--an alarum or trumpet-note ringing through the American camp. Wonderfully like the Orientals, too.... Since I have seen him, I find that I am not disturbed by any brag or egoism in his book. He may turn out the least of a braggart of all, having a better right to be confident. He is a great fellow.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Just so hollow and ineffectual, for the most part, is our ordinary conversation. Surface meets surface. When our life ceases to be... inward and private, conversation degenerates into mere gossip.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
In him the animal man chiefly was developed. In physical endurance and contentment he was cousin to the pine and the rock.... But ...the intellectual and what is called spiritual man in him were slumbering as in an infant. He had been instructed only in that innocent and ineffectual way in which the Catholic priests teach the aborigines, by which the pupil is never educated to the degree of consciousness, but only to the degree of trust and reverence, and a child is not made a man, but kept a child.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »