[Footnote: _Merlin_.]
What is the poet, thus shut out of Paradise, to do? He can only make a
frenzied effort to record his vision before its very memory has faded
from him. Benvenuto Cellini has told us of his tantrums while he was
finishing his bronze statue of Perseus. He worked with such fury, he
declares, that his workmen believed him to be no man, but a devil. But
the poet, no less than the molder of bronze, is under the necessity of
casting his work into shape before the metal cools. And his success is
never complete. Shelley writes, "When composition begins, inspiration is
already on the decline, and the most glorious poetry that has ever been
communicated to the world is probably a feeble shadow of the original
conceptions of the poet." [Footnote: _The Defense of Poetry_.]
Hence may arise the pet theory of certain modern poets, that a long poem
is an impossibility. Short swallow flights of song only can be wholly
sincere, they say, for their ideal is a poem as literally spontaneous as
Sordello's song of Elys.
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