Note 315 — THE PROPHECY OF DANTE.
Reading edition
[Compare—
"By our own spirits are we deified: We Poets in our youth begin in gladness; But thereof come in the end despondency and madness."
Resolution and Independence, vii. lines 5-7, Wordsworth's Poetical Works, 1889, p. 175.
Compare, too, Moore's fine apology for Byron's failure to submit to the yoke of matrimony, "and to live happily ever afterwards"—
"But it is the cultivation and exercise of the imaginative faculty that, more than anything, tend to wean the man of genius from actual life, and, by substituting the sensibilities of the imagination for those of the heart, to render, at last, the medium through which he feels no less unreal than that through which he thinks. Those images of ideal good and beauty that surround him in his musings soon accustom him to consider all that is beneath this high standard unworthy of his care; till, at length, the heart becoming chilled as the fancy warms, it too often happens that, in proportion as he has refined and elevated his theory of all the social affections, he has unfitted himself for the practice of them."—Life, p. 268.]