Now this fugitive writer has not been so swift but that I have caught him a clout as he went.  Yet he will do it again; and those like-minded will assuredly also continue to show how much more completely human, how much more sensitive, how much more responsible, is the art of the critic than the world has ever dreamt till now.  And, superior in so much, they will still count their importunate sensibility as the choicest of their gifts.  And Lepidus, who loves to wonder, can have no better subject for his admiration than the pathos of the time.  It is bred now of your mud by the operation of your sun.  ’Tis a strange serpent; and the tears of it are wet.

ANIMA PELLEGRINA!

Every language in the world has its own phrase, fresh for the stranger’s fresh and alien sense of its signal significance; a phrase that is its own essential possession, and yet is dearer to the speaker of other tongues.  Easily—­shall I say cheaply?—­spiritual, for example, was the nation that devised the name anima pellegrina, wherewith to crown a creature admired.  “Pilgrim soul” is a phrase for any language, but “pilgrim soul!” addressed, singly and sweetly to one who cannot be over-praised, “pilgrim-soul!” is a phrase of fondness, the high homage of a lover, of one watching, of one who has no more need of common flatteries, but has admired and gazed while the object of his praises visibly surpassed them—­this is the facile Italian ecstasy, and it rises into an Italian heaven.

It was by chance, and in an old play, that I came upon this impetuous, sudden, and single sentence of admiration, as it were a sentence of life passed upon one charged with inestimable deeds; and the modern editor had thought it necessary to explain the exclamation by a note.  It was, he said, poetical.

Anima pellegrina seems to be Italian of no later date than Pergolese’s airs, and suits the time as the familiar phrase of the more modern love-song suited the day of Bellini.  But it is only Italian, bygone Italian, and not a part of the sweet past of any other European nation, but only of this.

To the same local boundaries and enclosed skies belongs the charm of those buoyant words:-

   Felice chi vi mira,
   Ma piu felice chi per voi sospira!

And it is not only a charm of elastic sound or of grace; that would be but a property of the turn of speech.  It is rather the profounder advantage whereby the rhymes are freighted with such feeling as the very language keeps in store.  In another tongue you may sing, “happy who looks, happier who sighs”; but in what other tongue shall the little meaning be so sufficient, and in what other shall you get from so weak an antithesis the illusion of a lovely intellectual epigram?  Yet it is not worthy of an English reader to call it an illusion; he should rather be glad to travel into the place of a language where the phrase is intellectual, impassioned, and an epigram; and should thankfully for the occasion translate himself, and not the poetry.