thou whose brow was wreathed with the unenduring bays of Helicon, but thou who in angelic choirs hast a golden crown set with immortal stars,—­do thou breathe celestial ardor into the poet’s heart!” Then follows an allusion to a profound matter of temper and experience.  He prays that “the Muse will pardon, if sometimes he adorn his page with other charms than her own; for thus, perhaps, he may win the world to his higher meanings, shrouding severe truths in soft verses.  As the rim of the bitter cup is sweetened which is extended to the sick child, so may he, by beauties not quite Christian, attract mankind to read his whole poem to their health.”  Such is the stately soaring of the epical Muse, the Muse of ideal history.  Scholars find Greece completely prefigured in Homer, and the time may come when Dante and Tasso shall be the leading authorities for the history of the Middle Ages, and Milton for that of the ages of Protestantism.

In such comparison novels are insignificant and imbecile.  Though, like “Contarini Fleming,” they may begin with a magnificent paragraph, and fine passages be scattered through the volumes, they are yet rarely stories of ideas as well as persons, rarely succeed in involving events of more than temporary interest, and rarely, perhaps, should be called great mental products.

Not less strikingly does the difference between the epic and the novel appear in their different uses.  The one is the inspiration of great historical action, the other of listless repose.  The statesman, in the moment of debate, and in the dignity of conscious power, finds sympathy and encouragement in a passage of his favorite epic.  Its grand types are ever in fellowship with high thoughts.  The novel is for the lighter moment after the deed is done, when he is no longer brunting Fate, but reclining idly, and reflecting humorously or malignly on this life.  The epic is closely and strongly framed, like the gladiator about to strike a blow:  the novel is relaxed and at careless ease, like the club-man after lighting his pipe.  The latter does not bear the burden of severe responsibility, but is a thing of holidays and reactions.  Still, as of old, it answers to the contemplative castellar cry,—­“Hail, romancer! come and divert me,—­make me merry!  I wish to be occupied, but not employed,—­to muse passively, not actively.  Therefore, hail! tell me a story,—­sing me a song!  If I were now in the van of an army and civilization, higher thoughts would engross me.  But I am unstrung, and wish to be fanned, not helmeted.”

It has sometimes been claimed that the romantic style is essentially lyrical.  But though the idea from which many novels start was perhaps the proper germ for one or more lyrics, it never attains in romance a pure and unincumbered development.  We may illustrate the different intellectual creations founded on a common conception by imagining how one of Wordsworth’s lyrical fancies might have been developed in three volumes of romance instead of three stanzas of poetry.