The hint of this Shelley took from a passage in the second act of
Calderon's "Purgatorio de San Patricio."
No ves ese penasco que parece
Que se esta sustentando con trabajo,
Y con el ansia misma que padece
Ha tantos siglos que se viene abajo?
which, retaining the measure of the original, may be thus paraphrased:
Do you not see that rock there which appeareth
To hold itself up with a throe appalling,
And, through the very pang of what it feareth,
So many ages hath been falling, falling?
You will observe that in the last instance quoted the poet substitutes
his own _impression_ of the thing for the thing itself; he forces his
own consciousness upon it, and herein is the very root of all
sentimentalism. Herein lies the fault of that subjective tendency whose
excess is so lamented by Goethe and Schiller, and which is one of the
main distinctions between ancient and modern poetry. I say in its
excess, for there are moods of mind of which it is the natural and
healthy expression. Thus Shakespeare in his ninety-seventh sonnet:
How like a winter hath my absence been
From thee, the pleasure of the fleeting year!
What freezings have I felt, what dark days seen,
What old December's bareness everywhere!
And yet this time remov'd was summer's time.
It is only when it becomes a habit, instead of a mood of the mind, that
it is a token of disease.
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