And so
it comes that he who seems to stand most remote from his age is he
who mirrors it best, because he has stripped life of what is
accidental and transitory, stripped it of that 'mist of familiarity
which makes life obscure to us.'
Those strange, wild-eyed sibyls fixed eternally in the whirlwind of
ecstasy, those mighty-limbed and Titan prophets, labouring with the
secret of the earth and the burden of mystery, that guard and
glorify the chapel of Pope Sixtus at Rome - do they not tell us
more of the real spirit of the Italian Renaissance, of the dream of
Savonarola and of the sin of Borgia, than all the brawling boors
and cooking women of Dutch art can teach us of the real spirit of
the history of Holland?
And so in our own day, also, the two most vital tendencies of the
nineteenth century - the democratic and pantheistic tendency and
the tendency to value life for the sake of art - found their most
complete and perfect utterance in the poetry of Shelley and Keats
who, to the blind eyes of their own time, seemed to be as wanderers
in the wilderness, preachers of vague or unreal things. And I
remember once, in talking to Mr.
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